Home → Cataloging in NC Cardinal → Authority Records → Searching Authorities
9.2. Searching Authorities
Last Updated 10/20/2025
How to Search for Authorities in Evergreen
There are two ways to locate authorities in the Evergreen catalog:
- Retrieving an authority record by its ID
- Browsing the Manage Authority Records interface
Retrieve Authority Record by ID
To retrieve an authority record by its ID, select Retrieve Authority Record by ID from the Cataloging dropdown menu:
This will take you to the Find Authority Record by ID interface:
From there, enter the authority record ID into the associated field and click the green Submit button.
The authority record ID is the number that appears after $0(CARDINAL) in the corresponding bibliographic record MARC field, as in the example below for the subject heading "Turtles":
In this example, the authority record ID is 256444.
Using that example, enter 256444 into the Authority Record ID field and click Submit. This will bring you to the authority record, which utilizes the same Enhanced MARC Editor and Flat Text Editor interfaces as bibliographic records:
You will notice in the example authority record above, the authority record ID also appears in the 001 and 901$c fields.
Manage Authority Records Interface
If you do not know the ID for an authority record, you can search for the authority from the Manage Authority Records interface. To do this, select Manage Authorities from the Cataloging dropdown menu:
This will take you to the Manage Authority Records interface:
Note that this search interface is a Browse/Begins with search only. Additionally, it only searches the main entry field of the authority record. It does not search the synonyms/pseudonyms or the broader terms, narrower terms, or "use for" terms from the authority record.
The Authority Type search options are based on the MARC 21 Format for Authority Data which mirror the fields where you will find the information in your bib records.
- Author - use for personal names, corporate names, conference names
- Names: 100, 110, 111, 700, 710, 711
- Subjects with name structure: 600, 610, 611
- Series with name structure: 800, 810, 811
- Subject - use for subject terms in the 647, 648, 650, 651, 655 fields (NOT the 600, 610, 611)
- Title - use for series and uniform titles in the 130, 630, 730, 830 fields. (Authorized titles with the structure 800$a$t are treated more like complex author authorities in Evergreen.)
- Topic - use for subject headings in the 650 field only. (Topic excludes place names, genres, time periods, etc.)
Example 1. If you wanted to search for an authority record for the subject =600 10$aSmith, John,$d1914- or =610 20$aLibrary of Congress, you would perform an Author search (even though they are subjects in the bib record).
Example 2. If you wanted to search for the term “Maps” as either an LCSH or a genre term, you would use the Subject facet. BUT, if you wanted to exclude genre terms, you would use the Topic facet.
Using example 2 above, you can see some of the results of a Subject search for "Maps" below:
If an authority record is linked to any bib records in the catalog, the count will appear in the Linked Bibs column. As you can see in the example above, the heading "Maps" is linked to 2,422 bib records.
You can view these linked bib records by clicking on the word "Maps" in the Heading column:
From there you can view any of the bib records by clicking on the title.
Important Note About the Search Interface
There are a number of known issues with the Manage Authority Records search interface. It will often result in an "Error Retrieving Results" message, as pictured below when performing an Author search for "King, Stephen, 1947-":
Additionally, even when you do not receive an error, the authority record for which you are searching will rarely be listed in the first page of results, and you will need to scroll forwards or backwards to find the authority you want.
The search results begin on page 0, as you can see in the example above. Notice that in the previous Subject search example for "Maps," the authority was found on page 1, requiring navigation using the Next button to find the authority in question. You may find that you need to click the Previous or Next buttons multiple times to find the desired authority.
As in the Author search example for "King, Stephen, 1947-" above, to find the correct authority record on page -3, the Previous button is necessary:
As you click through the various pages of results, do not be surprised if you encounter the "Error Retrieving Results" message several times on several different pages. You will just need to continue clicking through the pages of the results until you find the desired authority (if it exists in Evergreen).