More on Name Identification December 4, 2008
Posted by Mia in Collections, Frontiers, metadata.trackback
To continue on my name thread, I think it’s reasonable for an academic library to make a commitment to establish and contribute the names of the faculty at their home institution to NACO, and at least have the institution’s faculty names represented in LAF authority files and consequently incorporated into VIAF and/or other initiatives as one more step in the road to author identification. Granted the marc authority record structure and format may not be optimal, but at least these are well-understood mechanisms in academic libraries which are widely in place.
Many academic libraries have already created or downloaded name authority records as part of the normal cataloguing process for their own faculty when published material has been acquired for the collection, though it may not have been policy to create an authority record for faculty members in every instance (for example, when there isn’t a name variation at hand).
It is not impossible to envision an expanded library role with respect to author identification for unpublished material typically deposited in IRs into the workflow. There would be significant overlap between the national authority files and author names present in IRs (cf DAI project; and Van Spanje’s presentation given at UK Serials Group 2007). As with the Netherlands project, existing name authority structures can be put to work while we wait for other or additional mechanisms to emerge.
Author identification can be further augmented by repository players, including the library, as things mutate and move along. With repositories workflows now coming more into play, libraries should be poised to start making some active contributions regarding the author identification issue.