Names and Identities. Karen Smith-Yoshimura Thomas Hickey RLG Partnership Annual Meeting

Transcription

1 Names and Identities Karen Smith-Yoshimura Thomas Hickey 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Meeting Boston, MA June 1-2, 2009

2 Names touch everything. Cartographers Scientists Authors Pseudonyms Actors Institutions Publishers Editors Politicians Historical figures Inventors Families Musicians Animals Translators Associations Government agencies Corporations Artists Correspondents Fictional characters Directors Plant discoverers Illustrators Architects 2

3 Names can be ambiguous John Adams the US president? the US composer? the British mathematician & astronomer? the British nuclear physicist? or someone else? 3

4 4

5 Names depend on context US: Chiang Kai-shek France, Germany: Jiang Jieshi China, Japan: 蒋介石 蔣中正 Arabic-speaking countries: شيانج آاي شيك Tamil: சங க சக 5

6 Information sufficient to identify and distinguish people and organizations is widely dispersed 6

7 7

8 8

9 9

10 10

11 Networking Names Advisory Group 11

12 Use case scenarios: Academic libraries and scholars Academic researcher University department Library cataloger Student Scholar 12

13 Use case scenarios: Archivists and archival users Archivist creating narrative history Archivist complementing archival materials description Archival researcher identifying resources Archival researcherexpert 13

14 Use case scenarios: Institutional repositories Researcher Institutional repository manager who needs to normalize researcher names Manager who needs to normalize corporate names Manager who needs to normalize department names Research information office manager 14

15 15

16 Cooperative Identities Hub Framework to concatenate and merge authoritative information Gateway to all forms of names without preferring one form over another Use social networking model Provide a switch to extract relevant information for re-use in own contexts Create federated trust environment to authenticate and authorize contributors 16

17 Hub objectives Increase metadata creation efficiency Easier to identify identity regardless of language or discipline Determine preferred form within own context Enable contributing agencies to augment own data resources Expose information about personal and corporate bodies beyond original contexts 17

18 Hub functions Searches by both people and software applications Edit: Add information, merge, split, flag for deletion Create new entities Batch update Discussion Audit trail and rollback 18

19 What do we have? A vision of an Identities Hub Thousands of libraries, archives, and museums WorldCat bibliographic & holdings data LC/NACO Name Authority File Other library authority files WorldCat Identities A page for name in WorldCat Virtual International Authority File A merge of a dozen national-level authority files 19

20 WorldCat Identities 20

21 21

22 22

23 23

24 24

25 Searching Identities Jump to Editing 25

26 26

27 More WorldCat Identities Jump to Editing 27

28 28

29 29

30 30

31 31

32 Editing WorldCat Identities 32

33 33

34 34

35 35

36 36

37 Merged result Immediately visible in Identities Persistent in Identities Information fed into established channels 37

38 Plans Implement editing in Research version of Identities Feed information (manually) into WorldCat/NAF Investigate how best to move to production Explore relationship with the Virtual International Authority File 38

39 Discussion Additional use case scenarios for your environment? What would benefit you the most? What is most appealing about Identities? What else is needed? 39