Method for maintenance of authority lists: a proposal from the review of Funarte’s authorities

Abstract

This paper aims do present a method for the maintenance of authority lists from an analysis and review of the Brazilian Foundation of Arts’ authorities lists. This analysis is part of a broader project to develop methodologies for organization, retrieval, and preservation of collections of the Funarte’s Documentation and Research Center, developed between 2020 January and 2021 July. Methodology: bibliographic research on authority control and maintenance and use of knowledge organization systems; inductive method with diagnosis to identify the context and issues regarding authority control, establishment of criteria and selection of the terms for maintenance; planning for collaborative work between the UFF faculty team and the Documentation and Research Center team; analysis of the information search and retrieval in the output of the system, identification and analysis of the ways of maintaining the authorities in the collections management system, identification of the semantic, syntactic, morphological and typographic features of the authorities in order to cluster and establish relationships among terms; creation of a matrix to carry out a systematic and controlled analysis and maintenance. Results: proposal of a method for maintaining authority lists based on the revision of Funarte’s authorities. A contextualized discussion of key concepts for information representation and retrieval is also presented.

Keywords:
authority control; knowledge organization system; Brazilian National Foundation of Arts; method for maintenance of authority lists