On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 3:35 PM, Andrew Nagy wrote:
>Hello - I am curious if anyone knows of a way to access the entire collection of authority records from the LOC.  It seems that the only way to access them know is one record at a time.  Feel free to email me off line if you are uncomfortable posting a response to the list.<

One way (as you likely know) (official, expensive) is via The Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service:

<http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html#lcaf>:

LC Authority Files
Name Authorities
MARC records for personal, corporate, conference, and geographical name headings, uniform titles, and series established by LC and cooperating libraries under the National Coordinated Cataloging Operations (NACO) program. Names written in non-roman script appear in romanized form only. Available in MARC 21 and MARCXML formats.

2008 Subscription: Available weekly. Approximately 450,000 records; including 250,000 new records.

2008 Price: $10,565

Retrospective: 1977-2007. 7,000,000 records. File size: 3,350 MB. Avg. record length: 479 bytes.

2008 Price: $10,675

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Otherwise, as far as I am aware, the files that are available (for free) are less than current.

I hope this helps,

Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x402
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