07 November 2008

Comments

We have had a few comments, just not through the blog! They fall into a few categories as follows;

1. this is a project whose time has come;

This has come from a number of quarters; from the library world and from people interested in learning object repositories as well as those running research repositories. Authority control has been around for a long time, but it seems the new context of digital repositories has led to the issue bubbling up for a rethink.

2. the timeline is very short;

Yes, indeed. Particularly with Christmas and the New Year in the middle, we recognise that we may have to cut our cloth to fit the timeline (sorry for the mixed metaphor). There may be a some flexibility with the March deadline, but we will see.

We are also focusing solely on personal names as an attempt to keep it as simple as possible.

3. will there be an operational relationship with People Australia?

We have already had a discussion about how this project might interact with People Australia and, without wanting to prejudice the outcome of the project, it does seem only sensible to build and use People Australia as the authority file for Australian researchers.

4. identifiers and vocabularies;

We have had mention of URL/URIs, People Australia persistent identifiers, ISNI, ISADN, OpenID and various commercial researcher numbers as identifiers. There are also many developments to do with schemas, DTDs, vocabularies, etc and sorting something reasonable out of all that will be a core part of the project.