Authority Control in the World of Metadata English version presented at the International Conference = L’authority control nel mondo dei metadati Versione italiana presentata alla Conferenza internazionale

摘要

"Metadata" became a recent buzzword related with the explosion of the Internet and the emerging of new contents and services by some way associated to libraries, archives, museums, and related organisations. A name given to this new paradigm has been "Digital Libraries"! In spite of all the thinking and developments verified in the recent years, we have to accept that there is not a unique and global definition for the "Digital Library". The perception of it depends too much from the perspective taken (this might sound not very good to the traditional libraries, but we should remember that this fuzziness of concepts is not so strange to, for example, archives or museums). That is a fact that we assume, and is not the purpose of this paper to discuss it! But it is very important to recognise it, especially if our next steps are going to be the definition of common models, procedures and standards that everyone associates to the term "Authority Control".