I ended my A Look at Who Creates the LCNAF post with a hunch that the Library of Congress Name Authority File is increasingly supported by particpants in the Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) rather than by the Library of Congress themself. It didn’t occur to me until a few days later that I missed a pretty obvious opportunity to graph the number of records created by LC compared with all the other members of the collective. So, here it is:

It looks like this has been a trend since about 1996 or so. I think it validates the cooperative aspect of the PCC and NACO. Not that it needs any validating. It’s just nice to see libraries and librarians working together to build something. I guess the name Library of Congress Name Authority File is also increasingly ironic…

Update: thanks to Kevin Ford (who emailed me privately) it seems that LC has been quite aware of this trend, and highlighted the event in 1996 when NACO members began contributing more records than LC with a press release.