SkyRiver Challenges OCLC as Newest LC Authority Records Node

Bibliographic services company SkyRiver Technology Solutions recently announced that it had become an official node of the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO), part of the Library of Congress's (LC) Program for Cooperative Cataloging. It's the first private company to provide this service, which was already provided by the nonprofit OCLC—SkyRiver's much larger competitor in the bibliographic services field—and the British Library.

Previously, many institutions have submitted their name authority records via OCLC. But SkyRiver's new status as a NACO node allows it to provide the service, once exclusive to OCLC in the United States, to its users directly.

Standards and practices
The LC uses authority records to establish standard names, titles, and subjects for LC bibliographic records. For example, as explained on the LC website, LC records use the established subject heading of "motion pictures" instead of separate subject headings for "movies," "films," and "cinema."

Name authority records work similarly, and also establish standards for transliterated names from foreign alphabets: for example, LC uses "Fyodor Dostoyevsky" as a standard English spelling for the 19th-century Russian novelist (transliterated from the Cyrillic Фёдор Достое́вский).

Only OCLC, the British Library, and now SkyRiver hold a copy of the complete and current LC/NACO Name Authority File, and are authorized to contribute updated and new records to the LC.

Institutions that have been trained in NACO standards—which include many academic libraries—submit their new and updated records to one of these three nodes. The nodes upload these records to the LC every night, Monday through Saturday, for review.

According to SkyRiver's announcement, the company's participation as a NACO node "represents the culmination of a development process which involved rigorous testing with LC to ensure the efficient exchange of authority records on a daily basis."

SkyRiver has long had a thorny relationship with OCLC. The company, along with library automation company Innovative Interfaces (both owned by Innovative chairman Jerry Kline), filed suit against OCLC in July 2010, charging it with anticompetitive business practices.