Amy wrote,

> 1.  Too many changes can sabotage the main purpose of authority control, 
> consistency in headings on bibliographical records.  Yes, automated file 
> maintenance SHOULD make this all easy, but the technology is not 
> perfect.  OCLC in particular has many headings that don't match the 
> LCAF.  Their mechanism of "controlling" headings depends largely on 
> one-at-a-time action by catalogers.  When we change an authority record, 
> we leave behind many uncontrolled headings in OCLC.

Here at UW we have a policy that when catalogers create a new heading or 
revise an existing one, they go into OCLC to change and control all 
relevant headings in bibs, even on bibs that we don't have holdings on. 
We only do this for records coded as following AACR2/RDA/pre-AACR2, so 
that records from other countries created according to other standards are 
not affected.  If there are too many to be worth doing this by hand 
(roughly more than 10 records), catalogers send OCLC an error report to 
ask them to bring the headings in alignment with the authority record. 
We have viewed this as both a service to the community and as a necessity, 
since OCLC WorldCat has been our primary discovery tool for our patrons 
for a number of years, and as such the entire OCLC database was in a way 
our catalog.

**************************************
* Adam L. Schiff                     * 
* Principal Cataloger                *
* University of Washington Libraries *
* Box 352900                         *
* Seattle, WA 98195-2900             *
* (206) 543-8409                     * 
* (206) 685-8782 fax                 *
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