05 December 2008

“Names touch everything…” here too!

Derek Whitehead drew my attention to this entry in the hangingtogether blog. The idea of a Cooperative Identities Hub as a more broadly based name authority file suitable for use by a wide range of data custodians (libraries, archives, museums, repositories, aggregators, publishers) certainly fits well with what this project hopes to do.

It has occurred to us that, because fresh new researchers frequently publish for the first time as a co-author of a paper while still a graduate student, university research repositories will often be the first to see the researcher's name and, as a consequence, be the ones to do the original authority work (and will also be in the best position to gather researcher persona attribute data).

So, if there is data which might not be of immediate interest to a repository manager, but is nevertheless easily accessible and likely to be of use to other institutions later, then we probably should gather it and pass it on.

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