ABSTRACT
The Authority File of the Biblioteca di Cultura Medievale is an archive of personal name forms and uniform titles (about 34,000 entries of authors’ names and subjects) that have been indexed while producing a catalog for a substantial specialized bibliographic collection. It covers the classical and late-antique periods through the humanistic period, and comprises all literary genres, disciplines, and texts relevant to the institutional history of the time. Considering the complexity and multiform nature of the entries registered in the library, and due to the international character of its use, a large number of analytics were created for works from the classical period through the sixteenth century (about 5,300 entries).
The development of the Authority File has been completed thanks to the automated tools and particularly favorable circumstances that have enriched it, making it useful both to librarians and students who want to consult the catalog. The collaboration of BISLAM, for example, besides ensuring the scientific character of the archive’s content and assisting in the research of relevant repertories, has helped to distinguish the characteristics of the respective products and, consequently, the diversity of methodological approaches, as well as other choices. The choice of the
586ALEPH500 software, a program which effectively and completely supports the format UNIMARC, has led the Biblioteca not only to discover and resolve the problems connected with the structure and content of the archive, mainly through the use of UNIMARC/Authorities, but also to search for every possible interaction with the bibliographic catalog. Moreover, the specificity of the proper names and titles selected by us, in addition to the international profile of our users, has required us to consider, from the first phases of the Authority File, the rules of national and international catalogs and other issues concerned with them, such as the language of the catalog itself, the standard formulation of the proper names and uniform titles for all cases of ambiguous or pseudo-epigraphic works, and the cross-references between them. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Web-site: <https://www.HaworthPress.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
