Weinheimer Jim wrote:
But here is exactly where everything begins to disintegrate: which will be the preferred form in the universe of the World Wide Web? Will everyone be expected to use the English form? (I doubt that very much) The German? The Czech?
Here's where the VIAF idea comes in. It was conceived _because_ not everybody wanted to use English forms. And it may be the best starting point currently in existence to support your vision! With VIAF in place, a user may enter any form of name, and as long as VIAF knows that form, it will silently replace that name with its IdNumber or URI, whatever, and send that one instead of the name to the (VIAF-enabled!) catalog(s) in question, not bothering the user with this maneuver. BUT: This works as long as the name entered leads to one and only one authority record in VIAF. There are two other situations: 1. There are several candidates for that name (When truncation is used, this will happen more often) Which of potentially very many name forms of the several records should be displayed? All of them, with no one emphasized? 2. VIAF doesn't know the name In this case, the best thing to do would be to open an alphabetic index in the vicinity of the name in question and let the user browse and pick. This may lead on to a case of situation 1. I wonder, though, in what way VIAF may be of help in boolean searches where one of the terms is a name. For you will want to enable users to enter "sawyer clemens" and the system to find Twain's "Tom Sawyer". Me seems neither RDA nor VIAF address that kind of situation. Maybe we should have an interpolated search in some kind of works authority file, and from the result, use a (or several) work URIs to do the actual search. But as always, it's easy to build castles in the air, trouble starts only when you try to move in. VIAF, as mentioned before, would have to be extended to include work authority records. Which do currently not exist, but should come into being with Scenario 1 of RDA. And if I understand you right, you also advocate a general deregulation of citation practices? B.Eversberg
