NACO

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.

NACO, the Name Authority Cooperative Program, is one of the programs of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), coordinated by the Library of Congress. Through NACO, participating institutions contribute authority records for people, organizations, places, works, and expressions to the LC/NACO Authority File.

The Library describes membership as open to individual institutions willing to support their staff through training, review, and direct contribution of records. Training runs as a multi-day workshop, and libraries too small to join alone can take part through a funnel project, a group of libraries contributing together.

Who is allowed to add and change records in the national name authority file, and the standards those records follow. NACO does not hold records itself; it is the program that governs how catalogers create them.

There is nothing for an author to join or register here, and any service that offers to create your authority record for a fee should be treated with suspicion. Individuals are not NACO members; institutions are.

What you can do is find a participating cataloger when you need a record created or corrected. Ask at a university library, a large public library, or your publisher; if they are not NACO participants they can usually point you to one. Give the cataloger clear facts about your name and your books and let them apply the rules. The PCC publishes guidance on how catalogers contact authors and creators, which tells you what they are likely to ask.

1. Search your name in Library of Congress Authorities at authorities.loc.gov (opens in a new tab) to see whether a record already exists.
2. If you need one created or corrected, identify a NACO participating library; the NACO site lists funnel projects and liaisons.
3. Contact a cataloger there with your name as published, variant forms, and a list of your books.
4. After a few weeks, search again and record the authority identifier once it appears.

NACO is a program, not a database and not an identifier. The record it produces is the LC/NACO name authority record; the searchable file is Library of Congress Authorities. It is not ISNI, which is run by a separate international agency with its own registration agencies, and not VIAF, which aggregates authority files from many countries. Authors cannot self-register in NACO.