SUMMARY Until the 1980s, concepts like authority control, controlled vocabularies, and metadata and schemas were all but unknown in the world of art and material culture information. This paper traces the evolution and current status of tools and resources for authority control of art information, and gives examples of how the lack of authority control can impede end-user access. Collection-specific thesauri and subject indexes, and vocabulary-assisted searching and query expansion are also discussed.
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Murtha Baca (2004) studied this question.