Search LC Authorities for the author name

A name authority record is the library record used to identify you as an author and distinguish you from other people with the same or similar names. It includes an authorized access point, the standardized form of your name used in library catalogs that follow Library of Congress practice. The record helps libraries connect your books to the right person, so if it is wrong, incomplete, or confused with another person, your books can be associated with the wrong author or become harder to find together. Most new authors won't have a name authority record until a library has a reason to create one, and that's normal. Authors can't create or directly edit their own LC/NACO authority records, so the practical step for every publishing route is to search and check. Traditionally and hybrid published authors may be able to get help through their publisher's library-facing staff, while self-published authors will generally need to work through a library or cataloger that participates in NACO. Search every name you publish under and keep enough identifying information handy for a cataloger to distinguish or correct your record if needed.

In practice this matters only once something has gone wrong, such as your books being filed under another writer's name or your own books being split between two entries. The useful thing to know is that the fix has to be made by a trained cataloger at a participating institution and that no fee shortcuts it, so a service offering to create your authority record for money should be treated with suspicion. There is nothing to join and no real difference between the routes here: on all three, the only move is normally to ask, at a university library, a large public library, or through the publisher's library-facing staff. Find a cataloger who can act and give that person the plain facts that separate you from another author.

Without a shared number, databases across publishing and libraries have no agreed answer to which person wrote what, which is how one writer's books end up grouped with another's. It matters most if you have more than one book, share a name with another writer, or work with a publisher that already carries these numbers in its metadata; a first-time author with an uncommon name and one title can reasonably do nothing. You may have one already, because many are created from data that libraries and other contributors feed in, so on every route the first move is normally to search the database rather than to request anything, and a traditionally published author can also ask whether the publisher requests them as part of its metadata practice. Record the sixteen-digit number only after checking that the works under it are yours.

If your books are split across two entries, or mixed in with another writer's, this is where you can see it, because it draws together what the contributing library files say about you. A first-time author will often find nothing here yet, and that is normal rather than a gap. Nobody on any route can claim, create, or edit an entry, so all three routes do the same thing, which is look; a wrong cluster is a symptom of a problem in one of the source files, and the fix normally has to be made there, through a cataloger or the relevant national library. Check that the works in the cluster are yours and record the identifier if the cluster is right.