Off - Road Authority Control Off-Road Authority Control Chris Long Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians May 29,

What’s the crime?

A New outlaw Undifferentiated Personal Names

Today’s Focus Personal name headings Free resources Mostly U.S. But will we even need authority control in the future?

The Rise of the Discovery Layer Author and subject facets in discovery interfaces The cataloging sins that we’ve tried to hide are being brought back into the light

Importance of Controlled Vocabulary in a Linked Data Environment Linked data (Reader’s Digest version)  Use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to name and identify resources on the web  Use HTTP URIs so someone can find the resources  Have the information provided by the link be useful, and provide that information using standards, like RDF (Resource Description Framework) and SPARQL  Provide links to other URIs so people can discover related information --Philip Evan Schreur, “The Academy Unbound: Linked Data as Revolution” LRTS 56 (4) : 2012 “Because machines are dumb, everything must be disambiguated.” --Attributed to Gordon Dunsire in the program “Authority Control in the Next Generation” at ALA Annual Conference, June 2011

What Can We Use to Differentiate Headings? Date of birth and/or death (RDA ) Fuller form of name (RDA ) Period of activity (RDA ) Profession or occupation (RDA ) Other term of rank, honour, or office (RDA ) Other designation (RDA )

Current Authors Organizational/Faculty websites  fuller forms of name, contact info Social media  Facebook, LinkedIn Colleagues at other libraries

Kühn, Elisabeth ǂ c (Intern) From Elisabeth Kühn’s LinkedIn page

Deceased Authors Can’t I just use Google? Of course you can! Thanks for your attention and enjoy the rest of the conference … Except … sometimes it works too well.

Death Indexes Social Security Death Index (SSDI)  name index to deaths recorded by the Social Security Administration beginning in 1962  includes over 89 million U.S. citizen death records  FamilySearch.org (  GenealogyBank.com (

Death Indexes Online Searchable Death Indexes & Records (  directory of links to websites with online death indexes, listed by state and county  includes death records, death certificate indexes, death notices and registers, obituaries, probate indexes, and cemetery and burial records  links to sites which go back farther than the SSDI, depending on the locality  some sites are free, some are not

Tombstone Transcription Sites Birth/death dates, fuller forms of name Find a Grave ( USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project (  Clearinghouse of links to projects across the United States Internment.net (

Find a Grave to the Rescue

When the Trail Gets Colder Obituary Sites  Google News Classic Archive (  New York Times ( Census Records  Not only good for birth dates, but also for occupational information to use as qualifiers Occupational Registers

When the Trail Gets Colder Local Histories  Internet Archive  both American and Canadian local histories  Online County Histories, Biographies and Indexes (  a state-by-state guide  State library and historical society digital collections  Google Books and HathiTrust Family Histories  Family History Books at FamilySearch (  RootsWeb (

Genealogical Sites Ancestry Library Edition (  Might be available through your ProQuest subscription  billions of records  U.S., U.K., & Canadian census records  Social Security Death Index  United States & Canada obituary collections  birth, marriage, divorce, and death records from many countries Cyndi’s List (  Categorized lists of links to:  biographical sources  birth/death records  census records  historical directories  local histories  newspaper archives  obituaries  occupational registers

Genealogical Sites USGenWeb Archives (  arranged by state/county  biographies  birth/marriage/death records  census records  local directories  local histories  obituaries

References Marshall, L. (2012). Using Internet Resources to Research Dates of Birth and Death of Relatively Obscure Individual for Inclusion in Name Authority Records. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 50(1), Schreur, P. E. (2012). The Academy Unbound: Linked Data as Revolution. Library Resources & Technical Services, 56(4), Fields, L. (2012). Authority Control in the Next Generation. A Report of the LITA/ALCTS Authority Control Interest Group Program, American Library Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, June Technical Services Quarterly, 29(2),

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