[Dspace-general] authority files

[MacKenzie Smith]

Many of us already have quite good local name authority files.
The problem was how to link them up to OCLC's sophisticated
name authority matching heuristics, which is done on their
server behind the Web Service interface.

i.e. how to make their server-side process fall through to a local
authority file (potentially different for each query) when there is
no match on the LCNAF or other national authority file?
Not obvious...

I don't think the DSpace community would want to replicate
the national name authority files as RePEc appears to be doing,
so the question is how to combine them with local individuals
who aren't already represented there.

MacKenzie

At 08:18 PM 12/27/2005 -0500, David Goodman wrote:
>Hint-- check the way its done in RePEc.
>
>Dr. David Goodman
>Associate Professor
>Palmer School of Library and Information Science
>Long Island University
>dgoodman at liu.edu
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu on behalf of MacKenzie Smith
>Sent: Tue 12/27/2005 6:07 PM
>To: Elisavet Chantavaridou; dspace-general at mit.edu
>Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] authority files
>
>Hi Elisavet,
>
>You can specify a set of legal values for the drop-down lists in the 
>submission UI,
>but you can't currently link that to an external authority file (unless 
>someone has
>implemented that since I last checked). There is also an "ontology add-on" 
>that
>the Univ of Minho has available here
>http://dspace-dev.dsi.uminho.pt:8080/en/addon_ontology.jsp
>
>There was some work done with OCLC a couple of years ago to try
>integrating a new OCLC name authority control Web Service with the
>DSpace submission module and that worked very well, but it never went
>beyond the demo stage... one problem was that the names in OCLC's
>authority file only included published authors so that many MIT faculty
>weren't found there (i.e. they only published journal articles or white 
>papers,
>not books).  We wanted to invent a way to include a local name authority
>file in the results, but never had time to figure out how to do that.
>
>This is functionality that many institutions would like to have, but I don't
>think there is a good, general solution for it yet and it's a pretty hard 
>problem.
>No one has volunteered to do take it on, to my knowledge...
>
>MacKenzie
>
>
>At 08:21 AM 12/21/2005 +0200, Elisavet Chantavaridou wrote:
>
>
>         Hi all,
>
>         is there a way we could link to authority files from DSpace 
> records? How do we avoid duplicate entries for names (authors, etc.)? Are 
> there any plans for such implementations in future versions?
>
>         Cheers,
>
>         Elisavet
>         University of Macedonia Library (GREECE)
>
>MacKenzie Smith
>Associate Director for Technology
>MIT Libraries
>Building E25-131d
>77 Massachusetts Avenue
>Cambridge, MA  02139
>(617)253-8184
>kenzie at mit.edu

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu