MARS Authority Control

MARS is one of the oldest and most reliable authority control offerings on the market. But don't let our age fool you.

With recent system upgrades — including a user-friendly web interface and enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and individual customization — managing your authority records has never been easier.

Backstage MARS offers name and subject authority control based on the Library of Congress name and subject authority databases. The authority control process standardizes name, subject, series, and uniform title headings.

Pre-processing

Prior to comparing headings against Library of Congress authority files, we check for inconsistencies in the record headings, standardizing your headings for optimal matching.

This process corrects errors, deletes or modifies obsolete fields, removes unwanted fields, standardizes punctuation, eliminates obsolete brackets and parentheses, and corrects inconsistencies such as invalid qualifiers and inversion errors.

Processing

We match your record headings against the Library of Congress name and subject authority file databases to update these headings:

Names (100, 110, 111, 700, 711)
Subject-Names (600, 610, 611, 630)
Series (400, 410, 411, 440, 800, 810, 811, 830, 840)
Uniform Titles (130, 240, 243, 730)
Subject-Topics (650, 651)

If the Library of Congress file doesn't have all the authorities you need, we can also match against these specialized databases:

MeSH authority control
LC Children's authority control
Authority processing using a locally created authority database
The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)
Guidelines on Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, etc. (GSAFD)

And we can continue to keep your authorities up to date with periodic notification services.

If you're interested in the nuts-and-bolts details, our MARS Planning Guide explains the complete authority control process in full detail. You can find a PDF version here.

Ready for more information? Call us at 1-800-288-1265 or drop us a note.