Karen,
Heidrun, looking at these examples (which naturally do not tell the
whole story) it seems to me that the authority records in your
catalogs do more than just establish preferred name forms; instead,
they approach what to me seems more like the description of a person
entity. The inclusion of information like the name of a spouse or the
occupation is more than one needs to convey the preferred and
alternate name forms.
Information like dates, occupation, place of birth a.s.o. was originally
included only to distinguish between different persons with the same
name. Note that in our cataloguing tradition, information like the dates
is never part of the heading itself, but stored in different categories
of the record. Because of our linking technique, we don't need
unambiguous textual headings. The disambiguation is done by linking to
the right authority record. And to make sure that you've got the correct
one, you can look at all the information stored in the record, like
dates, profession a.s.o. In a catalog display, it is of course possible
to show one or more of these additional bits of information together
with the name. E.g. in VIAF, German authority forms are always shown as
a combination of the heading (the name only) and the dates (taken from
field 548). So in VIAF they are made to look like name headings
according to the Anglo-American tradition, although they follow a
different "cataloguing philosophy".
You are quite right: Nowadays we do much more than only list some
identifying information in the authority records. We like to think of
our authority records as a "web of data" and love to have as many links
as possible between authority records. For example, in the record for
Thomas Mann (the author of works like "Buddenbrooks" and "Lotte in
Weimar : the beloved returns") there are no less than 15 relationships
to other persons. The record is shown here:
http://d-nb.info/gnd/118577166/about/html
or in RDF: http://d-nb.info/gnd/118577166/about/rdf
Whenever something is shown in blue in the HTML version, it is a link to
another authority record. You can click on it and work your way through
the web of the authority file.
This fits in with some thoughts I've been having about authority
control and entities. Although the FRBR entity is called Person, the
data is really only about the person's name, not about the person
him/herself. In contrast, if you look at FOAF [1], the entity clearly
represents the Person, with the name being one of many attributes.
Person entries in resources like Wikipedia, Freebase [2], and Open
Library [3] are also about the person, not the name.
I have thought that a good mix would be to use the library authority
data as an identifier, but to connect that to these other, more ample
resources to link to information about the person.
Definitely. Another of my "pet ideas" is a vision of a catalog which,
starting off from a bibliographic record the user is looking at,
presents him or her with lots of possibilities of things which might
also be interesting. Some of these possibilities would stem from the
catalog itself, but others would be derived from other sources.
You may want to look at slides 63 and 64 in a presentation of mine:
http://www.vdb-online.org/veranstaltungen/543/3_wiesenmueller.pdf
They give some ideas of the options which could be shown to a user
looking at a title record for Thomas Mann's "Lotte in Weimar : the
beloved returns". I'll give a translation of what is shown on the slides:
Slide 63:
About the author:
- Wikipedia article "Thomas Mann"
- Search "Thomas Mann" in Google
Biographies:
... (titles taken from the catalog)
General literature:
... (titles taken from the catalog)
Important works:
... (this information would be taken from DBpedia)
People around Thomas Mann:
... (taken from the authority record)
This author was influenced by:
... (taken from DBpedia)
Slide 64:
This author has influenced the following:
... (taken from DBpedia)
More titles from this author:
... (titles taken from the catalog)
About the work:
- Wikipedia article "Lotte in Weimar"
- Search on Google for "Lotte in Weimar"
Other editions:
... (titles taken from the catalog)
Free electronic editions:
... (taken from the tool "Umlaut" or something similar)
Secondary literature on this work:
... (titles taken from the catalog)
On slides 67 and 68 you can find a second example for a collection on
renewable energy. Among other things, I've included links to the
personal website of the editor or his profile in a social networks, a
link to the institution where he works (taken from the authority
record), links to Google Books and a scan of the table of contents, and
the Wikipedia articles on the topics covered in the work. On slide 68
there is a section "Find similar books", which would not only give
similar titles from the catalog, but also recommend suitable databases
for articles. There is also a section "related topics", and there you
find related terms and narrower terms (taken from the subject authority
records) and can use them for a new search.
Well, at the moment, this is only a vision. But I think much of it could
be done already. Obviously, linked data would play an important part in
the implementation.
Heidrun
kc
[1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
[2] http://www.freebase.com/
[3] http://openlibrary.org/
On 6/7/12 11:40 AM, Heidrun Wiesenmüll er wrote:
Karen said:
I don't know what your authority records look like nor how they are
exchanged and updated. Perhaps that's another difference, and
something we could learn from German libraries?
I'll give you a couple of examples from the brand-new "Common
Authority File" (Gemeinsame Normdatei, GND), leaving out a few of
categories for the sake of simplicity. I include translations and
comments in square brackets. But basically, you'll find your way
through the records, as the format is now quite close to MARC authority.
One of the objectives of the GND was to have data structures which
are better suited for the semantic web. This is one of the reasons we
now have lots of subfields (for things which used to be only marked
by brackets or some similar method before) and many codes, which
express e.g. the kind of a variant name or the kind of a
relationship. 1XX are for preferred names, 4XX are for variant names,
and 5XX are for relationships to another entity. If the relationship
is to a place (say, a place of birth), this will go in 551 and get a
code specifying the relationship (e.g. "ortg" for place of birth; in
German: Geburtsort). If the relationship is to a person, this will be
in 500, a.s.o.
A person:
005 Tpv [code for record type: authority, person, fully established]
006 http://d-nb.info/gnd/118869159 [URI]
008 piz [code for an "ordinary" person]
035 gnd/118869159 [control number]
043 XD-CL;XD-US [country codes for Chile and the USA]
065 12.2p [GND classification code for literary persons; input
only if the person is also used as subject heading]
100 Allende, Isabel
400 Allende, Isabell
500 [Link via control number to authority record for]Gordon, William
C. $4 bezf $v Ehemann ["bezf": family relationship, "Ehemann":
husband]
548 1942 $4 datl ["datl": dates of live, year only. Date of death
would go in $b]
548 02.08.1942 $4 datx ["datl": dates of live, exact]
550 [Link via control number to authority record for]Journalistin $4
berc ["berc": characteristic occupation, here: journalist. The "berc"
code is there to mark the occupation which is most useful to display
in addition to the name of the person]
550 [Link via control number to authority record for]Schriftstellerin
$4 beru ["beru": occupation, here: author]
551 [Link via control number to authority record for]Lima $4 ortg
["ortg": place of birth]
670 B 1986 [source: the dictionary "Brockhaus"]
678 $b Chilenische Journalistin u. Schriftstellerin; lebt heute in
Kalifornien [biographical information: Chilean journalist and other,
today lives in California]
A topical term:
005 Tsv [code for record type: authority, topical, fully established]
006 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4038953-4 [URI]
008 saz [code for a topical term]
035 gnd/4387112-4 [control number]
065 19.5 [GND classification code for meteorology and climatology]
083 T1---015515 [mapping to DDC]
083 551.5
150 Meteorologie
450 Wetterkunde
550 [Link via control number to authority record
for]Geowissenschaften $4 obge ["obge": broader term, generic; here:
earth sciences]
550 [Link via control number to authority record for]Wetter $4 vbal
["vbal": related term; here: weather]
670 M [source: the dictionary "Mayer"]
Note: The true links to the authority records for broader and related
terms have been only introduced with the GND. Before, we had the
authorized form of the other headingmere textstrings in the
corresponding categories.
A work by two authors:
005 Tuv [authority, work, fully established]
006 http://d-nb.info/gnd/7668078-2
008 wit [code for a work]
035 gnd/7668077-0
043 XA-DE [country code for Germany]
065 14.1 [GND classification code for music, general]
130 Composing for the films [preferred title of the work]
377 eng [language code]
430 Komposition für den Film $v ÖB-Alternative [variant title,
marked as preferred form for public libraries]
500 [Link via control number to authority record for]Adorno, Theodor
W. $4 aut1 ["aut1": first author]
500 [Link via control number to authority record for]Eisler, Hans $4
auta ["auta": author who is not first author]
548 $c 1947 $4 datj ["datj": year of publication]
670 Oxford Music Online [source]
Note: Unfortunately, up to now we only have a small number of
authority records for works - only for those used in subject headings
and for musical works.
Before the GND, we would have had two authority records for this
work. The first one included the text string "Adorno, Theodor W. /
Composing for the films" and the second one the text string "Eisler,
Hans / Composing for the films", and both would have been applied to
literature on this work. So, this was fairly similar to the
name-title string. Now, an author is rather seen as a relationship,
and this is brought out by a link.
How do you like the format? I think it's really well thought out. But
there are also some drawbacks, as the new authority format in a way
is "too modern" for some of the library systems in use in Germany. So
in some cases, there are considerable problems in making use of the
data in the way in which it was envisioned. But then this is all
still very new, and I hope the systems will adapt in time.
I'll write something about authority maintenance tomorrow.
Heidrun
--
---------------------
Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Faculty of Information and Communication
Wolframstrasse 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
--
---------------------
Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Faculty of Information and Communication
Wolframstrasse 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi