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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. ALA 2009 Another standard problem: One person, multiple personas Robb, J. D., 1950- Elly Wilder Roberts, Nora

7. ALA 2009 viaf.org/viaf/29541064 Fundamental to VIAF: One persona, many representations

8. ALA 2009 Matching process

9. ALA 2009 Brief LC authority 010 n 84044261 040 DLC $c DLC $d DLC 100 1 Larson, Jack. 670 Thomson, V. The cat, c1982: $b t.p. (Jack Larson)

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

11. ALA 2009 Mining the bibliographic record LDR 00826ccm 2200289 a 4500 1 ocm10025532 5 20031229650847.0 8 840627s1982 nyuuua n eng 10 $a 84758340 40 $a DLC $c DLC 19 $a 17706440 20 $c $2.95 28 22 $a 48418 $b G. Schirmer 45 2 $b d198006 $b d198007 48 $b va01 $b ve01 $a ka01 50 00 $a M1529.3 $b.T 100 1 $a Thomson, Virgil, $d 1896- 245 14 $a The cat : $b duet for soprano and baritone / $c Virgil Thomson ; [words by Jack Larson]. 260 $a New York : $b G. Schirmer, $c c1982. 300 $a 1 score (11 p.) ; $c 31 cm. 500 $a For soprano, baritone, and piano. 650 0 $a Vocal duets with piano. 600 10 $a Larson, Jack $x Musical settings. 700 1 $a Larson, Jack. Authors LC Control Number LC Classification Title Material Type Publisher Place of Publication Language Date of Publication Usage

12. 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.

13. ALA 2009 VIAF data flow VIAF History Deduplication/ Disambiguation BibsAuthsBibsAuthsBibsAuths

14. ALA 2009 Current state  Personal names from 16 files  Names are clustered  10.4 million names  8.7 million clusters  Identifiers assigned:  http://viaf.org/viaf/77390479 http://viaf.org/viaf/77390479  Preliminary work done on geographic names  Unicode throughout  UNIMARC and MARC-21 supported

15. 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  http://viaf.org/search?query=cql.any+all+"dempsey"+& http:accept=application/rss+bxml http://viaf.org/search?query=cql.any+all+"dempsey"+& http:accept=application/rss+bxml  Allows support of OpenSearch (RSS returned)

16. ALA 2009 URI Patterns and ‘Linked Data’  VIAF Record  Content negotiation:  HTTP headers or SRU extension Defaulthttp://viaf.org/viaf/9855044 Real World Objecthttp://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.rwo HTMLhttp://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.html XMLhttp://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.viaf RDF (FOAF)http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.rdf MARC21http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.m21 UNIMARChttp://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.unimarc

17. ALA 2009 SRU Searching  Retrieve record by internal control number  http://viaf.org/search?query=cql.any+all+"NKC|jn19990008936“ http://viaf.org/search?query=cql.any+all+"NKC|jn19990008936“  Results list for George Washington  http://viaf.org/search http://viaf.org/search ?query=local.mainHeadingEl+all+"george%20washington“ &stylesheet=xsl/results.xsl &sortKeys=holdingscount

18. ALA 2009 Matching

19. 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

20. ALA 2009 Consensus

21. ALA 2009 Little consensus

22. ALA 2009 Date variations are common

23. ALA 2009 Occasional long chain

24. ALA 2009 Example

25. ALA 2009 Search results for Sharabi

26. ALA 2009

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

28. 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

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