08 October 2009

All quiet on the NicNames front?

It has been a little quiet over here lately. At the moment, I'm writing a revised literature review on names. The JISC landscape review was a great summary of the names environment in June 2008, but it has been a busy year in our area and we'd like to share some of the more interesting new literature with you as well.

The JISC Names Project released its Phase One final report in July. This partnership between the University of Manchester and the British Library is building a national authority file for the whole of the UK. It's an ambitious task, and we salute them for it. They've already released a prototype of their web service; you can have a play here (I did).

Also in July, Peter Sefton from the CAIRSS Project wrote a blog post about how a NicNames web service might interact with People Australia (I particularly liked the picture of the happy repository manager and hope that will be me soon ...)

The scholarly literature is also reflecting some very interesting developments. I summarised Dorothea Salo's paper on the absence of name authority control in institutional repositories in an earlier post. It's exciting to see that the big journals are starting to weigh in on the action, too. If 2008 will be remembered as the year The Lancet published an article about two clinical researchers who had decided to become numbers, 2009 was the year Science started to care about names. Both articles discussed the merits of the ResearcherID product from Thomson Reuters, which they described as 'ready and available now'. (I'm not so sure about that ...)

And finally, a few weeks ago, Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza from Dartmouth published what looks like a very interesting paper, 'Writing and citing 'international' names'. As soon as I can get my hands on a copy, I'll let you know all about it.

Interested in more literature about names? Feel free to contact Rebecca.

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