Authority File Research Articles

Visualizing of the structure of subject trends in Persian articles published during 2008–2012 in information organization domain

This research investigates structure of the subject trends in the Persian articles published during the period of 2008–2012 about “information organization” in Iranian journals and creates a semantic map for this domain. This structure has been considered in two sections: First, the weight of each subject term used in articles was indicated, and then the relationships amounts of terms were measured. Content analysis and weighting were used in the first section. The Vector Space Model formula was used in order to weight terms. In the second section, Co-term analysis was used, that is, the number of co-occurrence of any two terms in the same article. Then the term/document occurrence matrix of these terms was created and at last the relations significant between terms were measured by Pearson Correlation Coefficient. To illustrate the structure of information organization domain, Ucinet software was used. Findings show that high-weight categories in Persian articles are: “cataloging”, “information retrieval”, “information systems” and “authority files”. Furthermore through weighting, determined that in trends rate aspect, the terms “ontologies”, “cataloging”, “evaluation”, “Dewey Decimal Classification”, “fields”, “libraries and information centers” and “descriptors”, “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records”, “metadata elements” and “National library and archives of I.R. of Iran” are 10 highest-weight terms. Research findings about the relationships of terms show attention to “cataloging” by “IFLA” and “National library and archives of Iran” and critical approach to this subject. Some other findings about this show: “indexing” are considered by cataloging and thesauri, “metadata” are considered in web-based and information retrieval points of view, “ontologies” term is considered in approach of basic concepts, tools and relevance, and attention to some organizations such as “IFLA” and “National library and archives organization of Iran” besides “users” and their information needs. In terms of weighting and relationships between the subject terms in Persian articles, “cataloging” is in the center of information organization domain. The semantic map of information organization in Persian articles illustrates three region of subject area including: 1. Cataloging, 2. Ontologies, thesauri and information retrieval, and 3. Metadata and information retrieval.

Linked open data for new library services: the example of data.bnf.fr

The Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) develops a new project, bringing together data from catalogues (MARC), archives (EAD) and digital resources (DC). It makes links and publishes web pages, available at http://data.bnf.fr , with already about 750.000 linked resources. All the raw data is also displayed in RDF and available with an open licence. The presentation will explain the importance of authority files and identifiers to build this kind of service, an give a first feedback on how users have been reacting to it: what kind of content is being used.

Cataloguing in the open - the disintegration and distribution of the record

As part of a strategic investment in openness the Swedish National Library has released the National Bibliography and accompanying authority file as open data with a Creative Commons Zero license effectively putting it in the public domain. The data has been available as linked open data since 2008 but is now also released in its original, complete form making it fit for re-use by other library systems. An important principle of linked data is to link out the other datasets. However, as data becomes more interconnected and distributed the need for ways to track and respond to changes in other datasets, even ones outside our area of control, becomes bigger. The issue of who to trust of course becomes vitally important. This paper details the motivation behind the release as well as the technology used to support it. Also, a consequence of exposing and using linked data is that the idea of the record as a self contained and delimited entity starts to fall apart.

La LC classification come linked data

In 2009 and in 2011, the Library of Congress made two of its largest authority files – Subject Headings and Names – available as linked data via LC’s Linked Data Service, ID.LOC.GOV. Both are offered in MADS/RDF and SKOS. It is LC’s objective, in 2012, to publish another of its largest authority files as linked data: LC Classification. Whereas the source records for Subject Headings and Names are encoded in the MARC Authority format, from which there is a relatively straightforward mapping to MADS/RDF and SKOS, LC Classification records rely on the MARC Classification format. Mapping from LC Classification to MADS/RDF or SKOS has been a little more challenging. For example, records that represent classification ranges, which are not Concepts intended to be assigned, are not easily accommodated in SKOS. This presents additional problems when needing to accurately represent the relationships in RDF for LC Classification. With comparison to the publication of LCSH and Names at ID.LOC.GOV, this paper will examine issues encountered – and how those challenges were addressed – during the conversion of LC Classification to MADS/RDF and SKOS for release as linked data at ID.LOC.GOV.

Dewey linked data: Making connections with old friends and new acquaintances

This paper explores the history, uses cases, and future plans associated with availability of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system as linked data. Parts of DDC system have been available as linked data since 2009. Initial efforts included the DDC Summaries in eleven languages exposed as linked data in dewey.info. In 2010, the content of dewey.info was further extended by the addition of assignable numbers and captions from the Abridged Edition 14 data files in English, Italian, and Vietnamese. During 2012, we will add assignable numbers and captions from the latest full edition database, DDC 23. In addition to the “old friends” of different Dewey language versions, institutions such as the British Library and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek have made use of Dewey linked data in bibliographic records and authority files, and AGROVOC has linked to our data at a general level. We expect to extend our linked data network shortly to “new acquaintances” such as GeoNames, ISO 639-3 language codes, and Mathematics Subject Classification. In particular, the paper examines the linking process to GeoNames as an example of cross-domain vocabulary alignment. In addition to linking plans, the paper reports on use cases that facilitate machine-assisted categorization and support discovery in the semantic web environment.

The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI): The Evolving Future of Name Authority Control

This article describes the project to build the initial International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) database by deploying the techniques used to develop the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). It focuses particularly on the work of the OCLC team in transforming the VIAF “resource file” model of matched data into a robust, operational, and authoritative file of uniquely assigned ISNIs as a base for an ongoing ISNI assignment system, and on the quality assurance validation of the database provided by the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The need for future interaction between ongoing ISNI assignment and name authority control in libraries is also explored.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Model for Arabic Name Authority Control

This paper describes the processes developed and implemented at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) to manage authority control in a multiscript environment. The author addresses key issues associated with creating a local authority file for multiscript materials, unique challenges associated with Arabic names, and authority control policy decisions and practices in place at the BA, including contributing records to the Virtual International Authority File. The author highlights important work that the BA is doing to promote standards for Arabic names in a way that takes into account user needs in the Arab community, as well as international standards, while laying the groundwork for further cooperative work between libraries in the Arab world and beyond. A detailed description of workflow with examples is presented.

Taking entity reconciliation offline

AbstractEntity reconciliation—linking names or terms to identifiers in external datasets—is a popular method of adding standardized structured data to loosely structured documents. Most approaches to entity reconciliation rely on remote web services, requiring network access during the reconciliation process. For use cases that rely on a “human in the loop” (reconciling entities during the authoring process), this requirement may be a problem. To address this problem, we investigated the feasibility of offline entity reconciliation against the Virtual International Authority File. Offline entity reconciliation was implemented by taking advantage of newly standardized browser storage interfaces to store and query parts of this large dataset locally. We present the results of this investigation and our comparison of the performance, scalability, ease of implementation, and cross‐browser compatibility of the various options for storing entity data locally.

Datos.bne.es: A library linked dataset

We describe the datos.bne.es library dataset. The dataset makes available the authority and bibliography catalogue from the Biblioteca Nacional de Espaoa BNE, National Library of Spain as Linked Data. The catalogue contains around 7 million authority and bibliographic records. The records in MARC 21 format were transformed to RDF and modelled using IFLA International Federation of Library Associations ontologies and other well-established vocabularies such as RDA Resource Description and Access or the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. A tool named MARiMbA automatized the RDF generation process and the data linkage to DBpedia and other library linked data resources such as VIAF Virtual International Authority File or GND Gemeinsame Normdatei, the authority dataset from the German National Library.

Amsterdam Museum Linked Open Data

In this document we describe the Amsterdam Museum Linked Open Data set. The dataset is a five-star Linked Data representation and comprises the entire collection of the Amsterdam Museum consisting of more than 70,000 object descriptions. Furthermore, the institution's thesaurus and person authority files used in the object metadata are included in the Linked Data set. The data is mapped to the Europeana Data Model, utilizing Dublin Core, SKOS, RDA-group2 elements and the OAI-ORE model to represent the museum data. Vocabulary concepts are mapped to GeoNames and DBpedia. The two main contributions of this dataset are the inclusion of internal vocabularies and the fact that the complexity of the original dataset is retained.

Reconsidering Universal Bibliographic Control in Light of the Semantic Web

The article discusses the future of universal bibliographic control in the context of the Semantic Web. Resource Description Framework RDF), the basis of the Semantic Web, allows the replacement of attempts at one-size-fits-all schema, rules and other international/global standards with what might be termed an all-sizes-fit-one approach, as shown by the example of VIAF (Virtual International Authority File). This approach can support a much richer ecology of bibliographic communities and their standards, achieved by establishing the semantic mapping of individual properties, and sets of properties (or RDF graphs), to form a connected web into which legacy metadata and newly-minted statements can be deposited. Such deposits are made at the natural level of the source standard, preserving local granularity, semantic focus, context, and the data itself, using one-to-one RDF representations of the standard. The web of semantic links then allows this data to be readily assimilated into a universal, web-scale environment which connects all bibliographic metadata as “library linked data”. The article is illustrated with examples drawn from IFLA standards such as FRBR and ISBD, and other international standards such as Dublin Core and RDA.

The Present Condition of Japanese Name Authority Control in Japan Seen from NACSIS-CAT Authority File

The Present Condition of Japanese Name Authority Control in Japan Seen from NACSIS-CAT Authority File

De-duplication of aggregation authority files

This paper presents PACE Programmable Authority Control Engine, an authority control tool conceived to maintain 'aggregation authority files'. These are obtained as continuous aggregations of records originating from a variable set of information systems with heterogeneous and duplicated content. To facilitate record deduplication in the presence of such heterogeneity and dynamicity, PACE user interfaces enable an iterative curation process, where data curators can: i configure algorithms for the identification of record duplicates; ii open work sessions where algorithm configurations can be run and evaluated; iii merge the identified record duplicates to disambiguate the authority file and iv repeat this cycle several times. PACE supports a tunable probabilistic similarity measure and performs record matching with a customisable variation of the sorted neighbourhood heuristic. Finally, it addresses the underlying performance and scalability issues by exploiting multi-core parallel processing and Cassandra's storage systems, to support I/O performances that scale up linearly with the number of records.

Building an name authority file for the Emperor and nobles and examples for practical usage in Digital Cultural Heritage

Building an name authority file for the Emperor and nobles and examples for practical usage in Digital Cultural Heritage

Implementation of EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context - Corporate bodies, Persons, Families) in France: towards the development of national authority files

This paper presents a collaborative project set up by the Association of French Archivists and the Archives of France which aims to create standardised descriptions of records creators (or to share existing information) and to propose models which archival institutions can reuse to describe their own records' creators. The objective is to provide French departmental archives with an easy-to-use, interactive and participatory tool. ISAAR(CPF) is the reference content standard and EAC-CPF is the communication standard, since the project managers wanted to provide archival institutions with re-usable and real exchangeable authority records which could be imported into their own information systems.

Index to Printed Music (IPM): Collections & Series (review)

Index to Printed Music (IPM): & Series. Developed and owned by James Adrian Music Company. http://www.ebscohost.com/academic/index-to-printed-music-ipm (Accessed December 2010). [Requires an Internet connection and a Web browser (for Windows, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, or Firefox 2.0 or later; for Mac, Safari 2.0x or Firefox 2.0 or later (build 412+)). Pricing: annual subscription for academic institutions is based on a variety of factors including but not limited to FTE, existing subscriptions to EBSCO Publishing databases, consortium agreements, and/or buying groups.] In 2008, I reviewed this database on the NISC platform (1) and pointed out many shortcomings of the product in its form at that time. Since then, the Index to Printed Music has moved to the EBSCOhost platform and, in addition, the editors have addressed many of the problems I had found that were not platform-specific. This review is an update to that earlier essay, detailing how the resource works now, in comparison to how it worked then. I am happy to report that on the whole the product is now eminently useful and usable. The task that IPM addresses is finding specific compositions published in collected editions, monuments of music, historical sets, or other sets or series that contain multiple pieces. IPM is the successor to Anna Harriet Heyer's Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music: Guide to Their Contents (American Library Association, 1957-1980) and the electronic sibling of Collected Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music: Bibliography, by George R. Hill and Norris L. Stephens (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1997; hereafter cited as Hill). The latter was intended as an update of Heyer's work, but was of limited use in its print form, which lacked an index. To quote from my earlier review, A computerized index to Hill was envisioned from the start. Index to Printed Music (IPM) is that long-awaited index. Indeed, it is not an index to be used in conjunction with the book; rather it is the book in searchable database form, considerably augmented by similar data for additional, more recent publications, and more detailed information about the contents of the publications listed in Hill. I refer the reader to that earlier review for more extensive information about the coverage and intent of both the electronic product and its print predecessors. Information about the product and online help are presented together on the EBSCOhost platform. The help is fairly extensive, though not easy to find. Information about the product, on the other hand, is scarce, unlike the situation in the NISC version. The link at the top of the screen when one is logged into IPM leads to general EBSCOhost help. The product also contains IPM-specific help, although it is rather buried. One can get to it in two ways, both of which arrive at the same Web page: by clicking on the question mark icon to the right of the Search box (then scrolling down to the bottom of the sidebar to Database Help | Index to Printed Music), or by clicking Choose Databases, clicking Detailed View on the resulting screen, scrolling down to Index to Printed Music, and then clicking More Information. This help includes a description of the resource, some search hints, a list of the indexed fields (not all of which are in fact available in the EBSCOhost interface), definitions of the fields, a description of the Collections Authority File (mentioned later in this review), copyright information, and a link for sending questions to EBSCO, as well as a U.S. Mail address for comments. When one is signed into IPM, there is far less information about the resource and the parties responsible for it than there was in the NISC version. Consequently, the user would have no way to evaluate the source(s) of the data to come to a tentative conclusion about its credentials. There is a little information about the database on the EBSCO site itself (http://www. …

A generic Web-based entity resolution framework

Web data repositories usually contain references to thousands of real-world entities from multiple sources. It is not uncommon that multiple entities share the same label (polysemes) and that distinct label variations are associated with the same entity (synonyms), which frequently leads to ambiguous interpretations. Further, spelling variants, acronyms, abbreviated forms, and misspellings compound to worsen the problem. Solving this problem requires identifying which labels correspond to the same real-world entity, a process known as entity resolution. One approach to solve the entity resolution problem is to associate an authority identifier and a list of variant forms with each entity—a data structure known as an authority file. In this work, we propose a generic framework for implementing a method for generating authority files. Our method uses information from the Web to improve the quality of the authority file and, because of that, is referred to as WER—Web-based Entity Resolution. Our contribution here is threefold: (a) we discuss how to implement the WER framework, which is flexible and easy to adapt to new domains; (b) we run extended experimentation with our WER framework to show that it outperforms selected baselines; and (c) we compare the results of a specialized solution for author name resolution with those produced by the generic WER framework, and show that the WER results remain competitive.

The DeathFlip Project: Automating Death Date Revisions to Name Headings in Bibliographic Records

The 2005 revision of Library Congress Rule Interpretation 22.17, allowing the addition of death dates to personal name headings with open dates, had a significant impact on the maintenance of bibliographic records. The decision not to include open date forms as “see from” fields in revised authority records destined catalog maintenance staff to higher levels of manual review and editing. At Kent State University this prompted a search for better options and resulted in the creation of a shadow authority file intended solely for automated “flipping” of open date headings to the new forms. The file is available to other libraries for use and experimentation.

How do Libraries Find their Way onto the Semantic Web?

The First Semantic Web/Linked Data Conference of German libraries took place in Cologne on 24 and 25 November 2009 and revealed much interest in advancing from a web of documents to a web of data. The contributions covered advanced applications at the Library of Congress and the Swedish National library as well as advocacy for linked data approaches and the use of semantic web tools in the library and cultural heritage domain. The German National Library announced the publication of their authority files as linked open data, with first prototypes to become available in mid-2010, and this constituted a highlight of the conference. Discussions about ontologies to be used, application examples and a summary of practical experiences completed the event.

Program for Cooperative Cataloging: BIBCO Records: Analysis of Quality

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) is an international program that brings together libraries that wish to participate in the creation and sharing of bibliographic records. These high quality records can be used by any library around the world without additional modification or change. Members of the cooperative adhere to a set of standards and practices that help eliminate extensive editing of records by participant libraries, thus allowing libraries to reduce the cost of cataloging. Even though the records submitted to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) database by PCC member institutions adhere to the established standards, some libraries continue to verify the quality of the access points in these records. Many libraries outsource this process to outside vendors who automatically check these records against the Library of Congress (LC) Authority File. The purpose of this study is to examine the quality of the PCC records in light of the changes that were made by an authority control vendor. The author will analyze the changes made by the vendor to the PCC records and explain the reasons for those changes.