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Authorities Home

About Library of Congress Authorities

Displaying and Searching Diacritics and Special Characters

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SEARCHING:
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- Subject Authorities
- Name Authorities
- Title Authorities
- Name/Title Authorities
Search History

SEARCH RESULTS:
MARC Display
Labelled Display
Headings List
References/Scope Notes
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OTHER TOPICS:
Headings List Types
Icons, Buttons & Tabs
Session Time-out Errors
Known Problems

Library of Congress Authorities Help Pages: use the browser's back button to  resurme searching

About Library of Congress Authorities

Search and browse approximately:

  • 265,000 subject authority records
  • 5.3 million name authority records (ca. 3.8 million personal, 900,000 corporate, 120,000 meeting, and 90,000 geographic names)
  • 350,000 series and uniform title authority records
  • 340,000 name/title authority records

    Associated references and scope notes are also provided.

To search the Library's online catalog for bibliographic and holdings information, please switch to http://catalog.loc.gov/ now.

Library of Congress Authorities is available free of charge. There are a number of known problems with this initial release. The Library continues to work with its integrated library system vendor to resolve them and welcomes comments and error reports via email.

This release does not include:

  • Z39.50 functionality
  • Full MARC 21 character set for display and download of authority data
  • Use of diacritics in searches
  • Keyword searching of authority data
  • Search access to form, genre, and topical subject subdivisions

Note: The Library of Congress is nearing completion of a project to create authority records for all form, genre, and topical subject subdivisions

About the Headings List Display

All initial search results are presented as a Headings List--an alphabetical list of all headings found in the Library of Congress Online Catalog that fall nearest alphabetically to the first words of the search, whether the headings have authority records associated with them or not.

Important! Authority records are available only for those headings in the list that display with an icon in the leftmost column.

Note: Because the Library of Congress Online Catalog includes millions of bibliographic records created over many decades and according to a variety of cataloging policies, the Headings List for a search may include many headings that do not have associated authority records.

Examples include headings labelled "[from old catalog];" name-title headings that under former cataloging practice could be assigned as access points without an authority record; headings consisting of established subject headings from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) combined with free-floating subdivisions; and subject access points established in a variety of other thesauri but not in LCSH.


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Library of Congress Authorities - authorities.loc.gov 
Library of Congress Online Catalog - catalog.loc.gov
The Library of Congress Home - www.loc.gov 
January 13, 2003