Authority doesn't mean that the information is correct. Rather, it means that you have authoritatively settled on a single form of a category of information that might be represented in several ways. It's a way to collapse lots of individual information that is fundamentally about the same think into a single set of information that is mapped to the same thing. This is closer to how people conceive of what they want from a book search than any of the tools I've seen..... I believe that with a little effort and some coordination, along with the tenets of Feist v. Rural, the Internet community could develop a WikiBook-a-pedia, or a compendium of updatable bibliographic information along with authority and chunky linkages that could be distributed freely.