1. IMLS Shareable Authorities Forum
Metadata Interest Group
ALA Midwinter Conference, Denver, Colorado
February 11, 2018
Here instead of Jason Kovari
Will be very high-level

2. Background 2016-2017 IMLS grant to Cornell University Library
Partners included LC, OCLC, PCC, ORCID, CNI, SNAC, BIBFLOW, Stanford, Harvard
Two forums:
October 2016, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
April 2017, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Report and reference model in progress
Jason Kovari, Steven Folsom, Chew Chiat Naun
Grant funded travel and portion of staffing
Also held series of conference calls with presentations from participants
Report is in the works: substantial portions have been written, but delayed by staffing changes

3. Why local authorities? Cornell participation in linked data projects
Interest in linked data from supply end, including ability to scale
Diverse stakeholders with strong motive to collaborate
Cornell participation in LD4L/P, OCLC entity pilot
FAST and OCLC works already used in Blacklight discovery layer
Diverse stakeholders, so ideal for a grant-funded forum

4. Why a forum? Practical reasons IMLS National Forum grant Staffing
Can’t solve the whole problem
Can share knowledge, perspectives, experiences
Create common understanding of issues
White paper and reference model
Or, what we could and couldn’t do
IMLS National Leadership Grant
Category: National Digital Platform
Type: National Forum
What’s missing from this presentation is the depth and richness of the interactions at the meeting
Very detailed notes

5. Linked data changes the game
Valuable data locked up in silos
Institutional authority files, genealogical societies, etc.
Knowledge created by sharing
Authority file as cross-platform need
Cross-platform authorities: forum participants included institutions that had tackled this problem (UNT Names, Opaque Namespace)
VIAF: shows how used we’ve already become to reuse of catalogue name data.

6. What we’re shooting for
RelFinder (demonstrated by Carl Stahmer at forum)
“Machine had once again met Mind, and Machine knew of Mind what Mind itself had not known” (Teju Cole)

7. Related projects (inter alia)
IMLS Western Name Authority File Project
Program for Cooperative Cataloging
Identity Management in NACO Task Group
ISNI pilot
URIs in MARC Task Group
OCLC Organizational Identities in ISNI report
JISC/CASRAI Organization Identifiers working group
Project THOR (Technical and Human infrastructure for Open Research)
Commercial efforts, e.g. Casalini
Related projects happening about the same time
IMLS Western Name Authority File – some of you may have heard the presentation yesterday

8. Partial list of forum participants
Western Name Authority File Project - Anna Neatrour, Jeremy Myntti
OCLC Dublin, OH - Jean Godby
OCLC Leiden, VIAF/ISNI - Janifer Gatenby
British Library - Andrew MacEwan, ISNI at European national libraries
Library of Congress - Paul Frank
National Library of Medicine - Nancy Fallgren
Europeana - Timothy Hill
Getty vocabularies - Joan Cobb
Johns Hopkins - Jing Wang, researcher identity workflows, VIVO
SNAC - Daniel Pitti, Worthy Martin
UC Davis/BIBFLOW - Carl Stahmer
Casalini Libri/SHARE-VDE - Michele Casalini, Tiziana Possemato
IndexData/FOLIO - Peter Murray
Opaque Namespace (Oregon State, University of Oregon) - Ryan Wick
University of North Texas/UNT Names - Mark Phillips, Hannah Tarver
Open Metadata Registry - Diane Hillmann
Others: Rob Chavez, Corey Harper, Simeon Warner (ORCID), Nancy Lorimer (LD4P), Nettie Lagace (NISO), etc.
Full list of participants here:
Participation was by invitation
Some participants may be in this room, and I hope they will join the discussion later.

9. What we learned Use cases/institutional mandates Data models
Persistence
Workflows (centralized vs distributed)
Technical needs
Social/organizational issues
Will talk further about a few of these

10. Institutional mandates
Everybody is coming from a slightly different place
European libraries building workflows for expanded collections
OCLC, Getty interested in requirements for aggregation and LOD publishing
Publishers want to use identities, less interested in managing them
Self-registration (ORCID) vs third party registration (ISNI)

11. Modelling issues Provenance Preferred labels Granularity
Provenance important to some communities (e.g. archival), less so to others
Preferred labels are strong traditional focus, but can impede interoperability, internationalization
Granularity (approach to hierarchy, name changes) can complicate identification across sources
More generally, compatibility of semantics

12. Social, organizational issues
Business models, licensing
Privacy, confidentiality
Sustainability (change management)
Governance
Diane Hillmann has a long-standing interest in this area, e.g. she encouraged us to think about sustainability even of the tools: consider OpenRefine.
Brought Nettie Lagace (NISO) into the meeting to help us think through these issues

13. Outcomes, directions Sharing algorithms for matching
Minimum viable product
Reconciliation as a service
Responsibilities of providers
Issues that emerged as promising areas for further work (will talk more about last two)

14. Minimum viable product
Scalability, reusability
Emphasis moves from unique headings to corroborating data
Best practices
May be domain specific
Take advantage of contextual information
“Get your data out there”
“Doing authority work without knowing you’re doing authority work”

15. Reconciliation as a service
A stack of software and data that would:
Harvest name authorities from various local sources (e.g. VIVO installations, institutional repositories) and aggregator sources (e.g. ISNI/VIAF/Getty)
Use data from the harvested name authorities to cluster likely matches
Provide a programmatic API for a user interface component to search/filter on the harvested data
Tim Hill (Europeana), Peter Murray (IndexData)

16. Reconciliation as a service
High-level framework for a wide range of use cases
Source/vendor neutral
Has to work with wide variations in data quality and completeness
Able to work with degrees of confidence

17. Responsibilities of data providers
Provide provenance (dates, sources, confidence, etc.)
Avoid redundancy (proliferating local identifiers)
Code disambiguating data in machine actionable fields
Allow iteration based on reports
Janifer Gatenby (OCLC Leiden), Jean Godby (OCLC Dublin)
Distinguished responsibilities of providers vs aggregators

18. Responsibilities of aggregators
Err on the side of duplication rather than conflation
Provide unique and persistent cluster identifiers
Record provenance of individual data elements
Use, but mask confidential or proprietary data
Provide mechanism for manual (and outsourced) enrichment and correction

19. Thank you Project wiki:
Contacts:
Jason Kovari
Chew Chiat Naun