Who's the Author?

Identifier soup - ORCID, ISNI,

LC NACO and VIAF

Simeon Warner

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7970-7855

CUL Career Development Days 2017, 2017-04-07

Promises and changes...

Identifiers, including ORCID, ISNI, LC NACO and

VIAF, are playing an increasing role in library

authority work.

We’ll describe changes to cataloging practices

to leverage identifiers.

We'll then tell a short story of the how and why

of ORCID identifiers for researchers, and

relationships with other person identifiers.

Finally, we'll discuss the use of identifiers as

part of moves toward linked data cataloging

being explored in Linked Data for Libraries

work (in the LD4L Labs and LD4P projects).

True

statemen

t

Sketchy

also LD4L

Labs part

This I

know well

Big win for users:

• All books by this Iain

Banks

• None by any other Iain

Banks (e.g. “Banks,

Iain, 1963-”)

A little additional

information

I do find 3 titles about this

Iain Banks

No links out

URIs for Persons (& other entities) in MARC

Use $0 sub-field for URI of thing/RWO

o RWO = Rodents Wildly Oversize (larger than ROUS)?

o … or maybe Real World Object (cf. authority or description)

https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/PoCo-2016/PCC_URI_TG_20161006_Report.pdf

https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/bibframe/TaskGroups/URI-TaskGroup.html

~5k VIVO URIs in catalog

for committee members &

advisors of dissertations,

part of ETD process

Link to profile not

provided via catalog

user interface yet …

but information is

present

NACO

NACO = Name Authority Cooperative Program of the PCC (Program

for Cooperative Cataloging)

“Through this program, participants contribute authority records

for personal, corporate, and jurisdictional names; uniform titles;

and series headings to the LC/NACO Authority File. Membership

in NACO is open to any institution willing to support their staff

through a process of training, review, and direct contributions of

records to the LC/NACO Name Authority File.”

(http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/naco/)

Collaborative construction of big centralized

name authority database that we use

Entity Types of Name Authorities in LC/NACO

6310631, 73%

183495, 2%

1444944, 17%

130208, 2%526623, 6%

Persons

Conferences

Corporate bodies

Geographic names

Titles

Data as of 2013-06-01, from https://viaf.org/viaf/partnerpages/LC.html

PCC report http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/stats/FY2013/PCC-Contributions.pdf

says 4,102,550 contributions to end FY2013 => 47% of LC authorities

Will focus on persons

Data from Wikipedia

but no URI

Linked (Open) Data and Identifiers

• Identifiers provide a layer of indirection that

authorized names do not

o Generally considered good practice to avoid

semantics in identifiers

o No change from “Banks, Iain, 1953-” to “Banks,

Iain, 1953-2013”

• Identifiers expressed and URLs/URIs make the web

work well

o Provide means to give access to human and

machine representations

http://5stardata.info/en/

VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File

“The VIAF® (Virtual International Authority File) combines

multiple name authority files into a single OCLC-hosted name

authority service. The goal of the service is to lower the cost and

increase the utility of library authority files by matching and

linking widely-used authority files and making that information

available on the Web.” (https://viaf.org/)

Automated matching/clustering of authority data

from many sources (mostly national libraries) with

(resolvable) identifier

Access to greater internationalization than LC/NACO

More entries that LC/NACO, wider lookup

Changing data may merge / split / delete entries –

not yet policies and mechanisms to handle this

Death date note added

everywhere

VIAF URI (“Permalink”)

and link to ISNI URI

ISNI: International Standard Name Identifier

“The mission of the ISNI International Authority (ISNI-IA) is to

assign to the public name(s) of a researcher, inventor, writer,

artist, performer, publisher, etc. a persistent unique identifying

number in order to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in

search and discovery; and diffuse each assigned ISNI across all

repertoires in the global supply chain so that every published

work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever

that work is described.” (http://www.isni.org/)

The key driver was the need for accurate identities

for communication and payment associated with

rights

ISNI in libraries?

The mission of ISNI has expanded beyond rights, for example data

has been imported to create ISNI identifiers for PhD thesis authors

and from VIAF.

Restrictive terms of use: “All content provided on this Site and

any materials you download are provided for informational, non-

commercial purposes and you shall have no right to modify,

reproduce or redistribute any such content or materials”

(http://www.isni.org/terms-conditions)

Both VIAF and ISNI operated by OCLC so one can expect good

interoperability between them

ISNI URI stable and

managed

Includes Wikipedia &

Wikidata links

ORCID: Open Researcher and Contributor ID

“ORCID’s vision is a world where all who participate in research,

scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected

to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.”

“ORCID provides an identifier for individuals to use with their

name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation

activities. We provide open tools that enable transparent and

trustworthy connections between researchers, their

contributions, and affiliations. We provide this service to help

people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.” (https://orcid.org/)

Research and scholarship focus

Expect use by individuals identified in workflows

ORCID by way of arXiv – the need

2000’s: Long running discussions between arXiv, SPIRES (now

Inspire) and NASA ADS about how to share author identities, and

how to connect with other systems... some experiments:

o arXiv author ids

o Inspire login

o Facebook integration

o LinkedIn integration

ORCID by way of arXiv – creation

• 2009: No non-proprietary solutions for name authority or

identifiers for journal articles

• Alignment of academic, publisher, funder and aggregator

interests – including CUL and arXiv

• Meetings starting in 2009

• ORCID Incorporated 2010-08-05 – CUL a founding member

Other ids and

links useful, but

the author-articles

graph is key

Why must ORCID be different?

• How many people should have ORCID iDs?

o UNESCO 2013 estimate: 7.8 million researchers

o OECD 2014 estimate: 25.5 million researchers

o Far more than person records in LC NACO, and rapidly

changing

• Around 2 million journal articles published per year

(https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4578)

Only partial overlapping with other kinds of

publication

“Sort it all out with manual effort” solution not

practical

Solve with researcher engagement and use in

publication workflows

Journal article round trip

ORCID iDs are intended to be integrated into research and

publication workflows, and become embedded in the metadata.

ORCID iDs will thus be associated with new works at the time of

publication – ambiguity avoidance rather than disambiguation!

ORCID

record

Manuscript

SubmissionORCID

record

ORCID

recordReview

Publication

w DOI &

ORCID iDs

CrossRef

DOI assignment

Verified ORCID iDs, update permission

Readers

Authors

Hub linking to other

identities – leverage

overlap that exists

Short biography under

my control

How is ORCID doing? – Very well!

• 653 member organizations, approaching break-even

• Worldwide use, many integrations, some mandates

• National consortia including Australia, Denmark, Germany,

Finland, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, UK

• Over 3 million ORCID iDs, steady growth

https://orcid.org/blog/2017/04/04/measuring-progress-orcid-2016-annual-report

LD4L Labs and LD4P (2016-2018)

Follow-ons from LD4L 2014-2016

LD4L Labs –Linked Data for Libraries Labs - https://ld4l.org/ld4l-labs/

(Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Iowa)

o advance the use and usefulness of linked data in libraries

o create and assemble tools, ontologies, services

o pilot tools and services with a view to solutions in 3-5 years

o develop tools and provide support for LD4P projects

LD4P – Linked Data for Production – https://ld4l.org/ld4p

(Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, LC, Princeton, Stanford)

o pilot transition of technical services workflows to a linked

data environment

o “production” means creation of catalog records, not

production-ready

Hydra lookup/autocomplete

• Building modules to support easy integration with popular

repository framework

• Leverage established Linked Data authorities instead of just

locally configured terms

• Example: Corporate Name from OCLC FAST

But hey! Didn’t you

say we should use

identifiers?

Lookup/autocomplete with identifier (1)

• Instead of storing just the authorized name, store identifier as

well

• Lookup unchanged – for example, an Agrovoc

(http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc) term as used in

AgriKnowledge+

Lookup/autocomplete with identifier (2)

• Having selected “hive products”, both that string and the

corresponding identifier

http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_3655 are recorded

Better for maintenance and opportunity to link out

• Matching terms in other

vocabularies

• Related terms

• Labels in many languages

• Admin metadata

VitroLib – A experimental cataloging tool

• Using Vitro (the platform behind VIVO), customized for library

metadata as an editing environment – VitroLib

• Usability studies to understand how to build systems that will

work for cataloging

Early days, long journey!

“Let’s imagine you are creating

an entirely new record”

“But I never create an entirely

new record!”

“Oh, and BTW, we shouldn’t say

record”

Why move from authorities to identifiers?

• Reduce maintenance and copy/paste work in library

environment

• Bridge between library catalog world and rest-of-world

o Journal literature

o Popular web

o Profiling services

• Better services to users

o More links to related sources

o Better localization options (maybe some users don’t want

the romanized names?)

o Better discovery (leverage structured data from other

sources)

That’s all folks…

• Thanks to Huda Khan and Nick Cappadona for VitroLib

prototype screenshot

• Thanks to Lynette Rayle for screenshots of Hydra “Questioning

Authority” work

• Thanks to Christina Harlow for finding examples in the catalog!

• Thanks to Cornell LD4L Labs and LD4P teams, including: Dean

Krafft, Lynette Rayle, Rebecca Younes, Jim Blake, Muhammad

Javed, Huda Khan, Nick Cappadona, Sandy Payette, Chew Chiat

Naun, Steven Folsom, Jason Kovari and Christina Harlow