Interesting. Thanks for confirming the suspicions.
On the one hand I know that corporations are not authors like the
people who actually write the texts and think the distinction should
be kept. Importing them as authors is not right.
On the other hand, putting the names in a free text field in the
Editions of works (as contributors are stored now) loses the
connection to other works 'by' the corporation. And didn't library
science eventually result in the recognition of persons, corporations,
geopolitical entities and conferences as "entities responsible for
work"? Sure, it may be difficult for amateur cataloguers to handle
these "entity types" and outside the scope of Open Library ("books"),
but disposing information like author type altogether makes OL data a
little less easily usable, IMHO.
I proposed creating a field in the author record to make the
distinction: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/145
If Open Library decides this data is useful after all, I think it's in
compliance with the reuse rules to match names against VIAF.
Alternatively, one (bot) could re-read the MARC records used during
import.
http://viaf.org has been discussed for matching against, but its data
ha(s|ve) recently been released under ODC-By license and some comments
have been made about the VIAF URLs being enough attribution:
http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2012/05/viaf-dataset.html
Ben
On 20 May 2012 04:57, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well, it's possible that you shouldn't listen to me :-) because I just
> looked at the code and it does indeed include the 110 as an author --
> whereas my memory was that we didn't include the corporations as authors
> because most non-librarians wouldn't think of them as authors.
>
> So much for my memory. However, I wish we HAD moved the corporations to a
> field other than author.
>
> kc
>
>
> On 5/19/12 8:01 AM, Ben Companjen wrote:
>>
>> On 19 May 2012 16:11, Karen Coyle<[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I took a look at some of these. Many are corporate authors, and I saw
>>> some where the author names are identical. It isn't clear to me why
>>> these didn't get auto-merged. Maybe it's worth having one of the
>>> programmers take a look at this before we hand merge them all.
>>
>>
>> Since most duplicates were last edited by ImportBot in 2008, I get the
>> impression that maybe ImportBot wasn't capable of checking whether the
>> author was already in the database. Or, but this is speculation, it's
>> a long-running April Fool's joke (seeing that many were last edited
>> April 1st, 2008). ;)
>>
>>>
>>> It's also entirely unclear to me why we ended up with these in authors
>>> when they are coded as a corporate authors:
>>>
>>> 110 00 $aPUNJAB. GOVERNMENT
>>> 110 1 $aWest Sussex (England).$bCounty Planning Department.
>>>
>>> I thought that corporate authors were moved to "collaborator" rather
>>> than the author field. So I'm thinking that something went wrong with
>>> the loading. The two above are from Toronto library and Talis, so it's
>>> not just one source.
>>
>>
>> To me, it's getting more and more obvious that that *may* never have
>> happened. At least it seems it didn't happen during imports in 2008.
>> And without written cataloguing rules and so many examples of
>> corporate identities in the author fields and records, you have been
>> the only source for me saying that they should go in the contributors.
>> No offense to you, you're a great source :)
>>
>> On a perhaps related note:
>> http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2734614A/Various_Authors :)
>>
>> Ben
>>>
>>>
>>> kc
>>>
>>
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> [email protected] http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
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