Identity Management Analysis: An Empirical Investigation into the State of Library Community’s Authority Data Conformance to the New Standard

Identity management in the library community focuses on creation, conversion, sharing and maintenance of authority data – the massive databases of the standardized machine-readable records that describe persons, institutions, places, events, and works and relations between them. This chapter presents some results of the content analysis study that explores the state of implementation of Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard in authority records for personal, corporate, geographic names and uniform (preferred) titles. The study that focuses on a snapshot of identity data from 2016 reveals that a large proportion of authority records are created according to or revised to be brought in conformance with RDA requirements in terms of including one or more new data elements that increase functionality of these records and enhance access to resources. Results of the quantitative analysis of a large sample of RDA-based name authority records and title authority records available through the United States Library of Congress Database suggest those RDA-specific data elements – both fields and subfields – that are most widely applied in the authority data and identify the ones that need more attention by record creators, in particular the Linked Data enabling data elements. Directions for future research are suggested.