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.
Showing posts with label Dorothea Salo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dorothea Salo. Show all posts
08 October 2009
04 March 2009
The trouble with names is they belong to people
I recently read Dorothea Salo's latest article, 'Name authority control in institutional repositories', which will appear in the April issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. (You can find the preprint here).
As a repository manager, Salo is aware that name authority problems have a significant impact, not just for librarians responsible for content management in repositories, but also on repository users and the discoverability of our content. She believes that one of the reasons for the problems we experience managing author names is that we never envisaged our institutional repositories as library-managed databases; they were meant to be 'do-it-yourself' (Salo 2009) author deposit mechanisms. This means we didn't plan how to control our author metadata in the first instance.
But even if we had, how would we have controlled it?
Traditional cataloguing standards like AACR2 are designed by librarians for librarians, and for library systems frankly more concerned with stock inventory than resource discovery. Authors have no input in the way their works are represented in a library catalogue; cataloguing standards treat them as just another piece of descriptive metadata.
Whether we populate our repositories through self-deposit or librarians recruiting content themselves, there's no doubt that authors are much more to IRs than just another metadata element.
For starters, without authors institutional repositories have no content, and without content, they don't exist. And the location of authors at the time they create a work is the sole basis for their inclusion in an institutional repository's collection.
Salo's viewpoint is that the problems with consistency in repository content are tied to software. But a quick glance at institutional repositories using a variety of software solutions shows that name variant problems affect them all. No single repository, regardless of architecture, can escape this issue, because it's not a software but a human element. And people are always much trickier than technology.
Salo believes that eventually institutional repository software will improve, and that '[i]n the meantime, institutional-repository managers can only plan to plow large amounts of staff time into managing names' (Salo 2009). But the truth is that it's not that easy. We've already spent inordinate amounts of time trying to find a way to manage author names in Swinburne Research Bank, and we've drawn a blank.
Salo notes that EPrints software (unlike DSpace and Fedora) has an autocomplete function, which allows depositors to select from names in the repository's existing vocabulary when they create author metadata. But this is not a long-term solution. While it might help with cases where authors use their initials on some papers and their full names on others (assuming we're comfortable with overwriting these differences---and that's a big assumption), it's just not appropriate when authors associate a different identity with a particular name variant (eg a married name, legal change of name, etc).
Names are not just about software. They're about people.
And this is where NicNames comes in.
--Rebecca Parker, NicNames Subject Matter Expert
UPDATE: The article has now been published, and is available here.
As a repository manager, Salo is aware that name authority problems have a significant impact, not just for librarians responsible for content management in repositories, but also on repository users and the discoverability of our content. She believes that one of the reasons for the problems we experience managing author names is that we never envisaged our institutional repositories as library-managed databases; they were meant to be 'do-it-yourself' (Salo 2009) author deposit mechanisms. This means we didn't plan how to control our author metadata in the first instance.
But even if we had, how would we have controlled it?
Traditional cataloguing standards like AACR2 are designed by librarians for librarians, and for library systems frankly more concerned with stock inventory than resource discovery. Authors have no input in the way their works are represented in a library catalogue; cataloguing standards treat them as just another piece of descriptive metadata.
Whether we populate our repositories through self-deposit or librarians recruiting content themselves, there's no doubt that authors are much more to IRs than just another metadata element.
For starters, without authors institutional repositories have no content, and without content, they don't exist. And the location of authors at the time they create a work is the sole basis for their inclusion in an institutional repository's collection.
Salo's viewpoint is that the problems with consistency in repository content are tied to software. But a quick glance at institutional repositories using a variety of software solutions shows that name variant problems affect them all. No single repository, regardless of architecture, can escape this issue, because it's not a software but a human element. And people are always much trickier than technology.
Salo believes that eventually institutional repository software will improve, and that '[i]n the meantime, institutional-repository managers can only plan to plow large amounts of staff time into managing names' (Salo 2009). But the truth is that it's not that easy. We've already spent inordinate amounts of time trying to find a way to manage author names in Swinburne Research Bank, and we've drawn a blank.
Salo notes that EPrints software (unlike DSpace and Fedora) has an autocomplete function, which allows depositors to select from names in the repository's existing vocabulary when they create author metadata. But this is not a long-term solution. While it might help with cases where authors use their initials on some papers and their full names on others (assuming we're comfortable with overwriting these differences---and that's a big assumption), it's just not appropriate when authors associate a different identity with a particular name variant (eg a married name, legal change of name, etc).
Names are not just about software. They're about people.
And this is where NicNames comes in.
--Rebecca Parker, NicNames Subject Matter Expert
UPDATE: The article has now been published, and is available here.
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