Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Thomas Hickey's Names and Identities presentation from the RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, June 1, 2009.

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
Editors Institutions Publishers
Politicians
Historical figures Families
Inventors
Musicians Animals Translators
Associations Government agencies
Corporations
Artists Correspondents
Fictional characters
Directors
Plant discoverers Illustrators Architects
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3. Names can be ambiguous…
“John Adams”
… the US president?
… the US composer?
… the British
mathematician &
astronomer?
… the British nuclear
physicist?
… or someone else?
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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: சங் ைக ெசக்
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6. Information sufficient to identify and
distinguish people and organizations is
widely dispersed…
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11. Networking Names
Advisory Group
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12. Use case scenarios:
Academic libraries and scholars
• Academic researcher
• University department
• Library cataloger
• Student
• Scholar
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13. Use case scenarios:
Archivists and archival users
• Archivist creating
narrative history
• Archivist complementing
archival materials
description
• Archival researcher
identifying resources
• Archival researcher-
expert
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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20. WorldCat Identities
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25. Searching Identities
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27. More WorldCat Identities
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32. Editing WorldCat Identities
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37. Merged result
Immediately visible in Identities
Persistent in Identities
Information fed into established channels
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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
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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?
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