The Virtual International Authority File Thomas Hickey ACIG 2009 July 12 ALA, Chicago IL

ALA 2009 VIAF participants  Bibliothèque nationale de France  Deutsche Nationalbibliothek  Library of Congress/NACO  OCLC  National Library of the Czech Republic  Egypt (Bibliotheca Alexandrina)  National Library of Australia  National Library of Israel  Italy (ICCU)  National Library of Portugal  National Library of Spain  National Library of Sweden  Swiss National Library  Vatican Library

ALA 2009 Goals of the Virtual International Authority File  Link national-level authority records  Expand the concept of universal bibliographic control  Allow national or regional variations in authorized form to co-exist  Support needs for variations in preferred language, script and spelling  Play a role in the emerging semantic web

ALA 2009 Scope of VIAF  Personal names  Geographic  Corporate  Title  Family  Events  Everything but concepts are considered in scope  National level, but willing to consider other sources

ALA 2009 A standard problem: One name, multiple people Fournier, Marcel Fournier, Marcel,‡1946- Fournier,Marcel, ‡1945-

ALA 2009 Another standard problem: One person, multiple personas Robb, J. D., Elly Wilder Roberts, Nora

ALA 2009 viaf.org/viaf/ Fundamental to VIAF: One persona, many representations

ALA 2009 Matching process

ALA 2009 Brief LC authority 010 n DLC $c DLC $d DLC Larson, Jack. 670 Thomson, V. The cat, c1982: $b t.p. (Jack Larson)

ALA 2009 Enhancing the authorities Bibliographic Record Derived Authority Record Enhanced Authority

ALA 2009 Mining the bibliographic record LDR 00826ccm a ocm s1982 nyuuua n eng 10 $a $a DLC $c DLC 19 $a $c $ $a $b G. Schirmer 45 2 $b d $b d $b va01 $b ve01 $a ka $a M $b.T $a Thomson, Virgil, $d $a The cat : $b duet for soprano and baritone / $c Virgil Thomson ; [words by Jack Larson]. 260 $a New York : $b G. Schirmer, $c c $a 1 score (11 p.) ; $c 31 cm. 500 $a For soprano, baritone, and piano $a Vocal duets with piano $a Larson, Jack $x Musical settings $a Larson, Jack. Authors LC Control Number LC Classification Title Material Type Publisher Place of Publication Language Date of Publication Usage

ALA 2009 Information in bibliographic records  He is a lyricist  His primary subject area is music  He was published in the 80s and 90s by G. Schirmer and Belwin Mills in New York  Worked with Virgil Thomson and Gerhard Samuel  Jack Larson is the only name he has used on his publications  Etc.

ALA 2009 VIAF data flow VIAF History Deduplication/ Disambiguation BibsAuthsBibsAuthsBibsAuths

ALA 2009 Current state  Personal names from 16 files  Names are clustered  10.4 million names  8.7 million clusters  Identifiers assigned:   Preliminary work done on geographic names  Unicode throughout  UNIMARC and MARC-21 supported

ALA 2009 VIAF interface is built on top of SRU  SRU grew out of Z39.50  VIAF is SRU plus URL-rewrite rules and content- negotiation  Also modified to allow the return records without SRU XML wrapper  New query parameter HTTP Accept   Allows support of OpenSearch (RSS returned)

ALA 2009 URI Patterns and ‘Linked Data’  VIAF Record  Content negotiation:  HTTP headers or SRU extension Defaulthttp://viaf.org/viaf/ Real World Objecthttp://viaf.org/viaf/ rwo HTMLhttp://viaf.org/viaf/ html XMLhttp://viaf.org/viaf/ viaf RDF (FOAF) MARC21http://viaf.org/viaf/ m21 UNIMARChttp://viaf.org/viaf/ unimarc

ALA 2009 SRU Searching  Retrieve record by internal control number   Results list for George Washington  ?query=local.mainHeadingEl+all+"george%20washington“ &stylesheet=xsl/results.xsl &sortKeys=holdingscount

ALA 2009 Matching

ALA 2009 What makes a match? 1,705,555 Title 846,722 Double date 123,487 Joint author 71,851 LCCN 24,587 Partial date and partial title 11,010 Partial date and publisher 9,179 Partial title and publisher 6,415 Name as subject 3,168 Standard number

ALA 2009 Consensus

ALA 2009 Little consensus

ALA 2009 Date variations are common

ALA 2009 Occasional long chain

ALA 2009 Example

ALA 2009 Search results for Sharabi

ALA 2009

Next steps  More participants  More name types (geographics, corporates,…)  More variety of sources  Rights agencies, ISNI  Regional files  Specialized files

ALA 2009 Possible applications within OCLC  FRBR matching  Better matching of non-English metadata  Uniform identifier across all languages  Authority control for cataloging  Better regionalization of WorldCat.org  Minimize differences across languages of cataloging

ALA 2009 Discussion  How would you use VIAF?  How important is VIAF?  Will anyone use linked-data URIs?