Re: [ol-discuss] Zero works
On 9/2/13 3:30 AM, Patrick Conley wrote: Zero works means that there is an edition linked with this author but not a work. A long time ago work pages were created for most of the editions, but not for all editions. BTW: Imho it would be helpful if OL would distinguish between a person (an individual author) and a name (VIAF used the term undifferentiated). The two kind of pages could be marked by using colors: - a white author page (for example) would imply: name, disambiguation, unverified information - a light blue page: person (with year of birth, occupation, external links etc.), verified information I empathize with this, Patrick, but there are many individual authors without year of birth -- the cataloging rule in the Anglo-American community has been that the first author with that name (John Smith) does not need additional information, and subsequent authors with the same name are distinguished using year of the birth or other information. I cannot defend the logic of this, but there it is. The only way to know which is undifferentiated would be to have the names under authority control. However, the author strings in OL have been modified from the original input (e.g. FROM: Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) TO: J. R. R. Tolkien). I wish that the original library authoritative name had been stored somewhere in the record, but it was not. Having that would allow us to link to VIAF, and therefore we could know which names were settled in terms of identity. It still would be possible to retrieve names from the original MARC records, but that seems to me to be a bit more work. If we had the links to VIAF then 1) we could use the form with the link to VIAF as the one to merge with 2) we could concentrate efforts on the names with no such link. kc patrick Am 02.09.2013 01:55, schrieb Karen Coyle: Thanks, Tom. I'm idly working through starting near the bottom. I notice that some of the authors have zero works -- I'm not sure how this happens but I think I've seen this before . I assume it was a merge or clean-up that didn't fully clean up after itself. I'm merging these anyway. kc ___ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet ___ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-discuss] Zero works
On 02/09/2013 03:30, Patrick Conley wrote: BTW: Imho it would be helpful if OL would distinguish between a person (an individual author) and a name (VIAF used the term undifferentiated). As Tom has mentioned, there is firstly a distinction to make between individuals and corporate bodies, meetings, etc. Once you know you're talking about individual authors, you can then get on to the issue of verification/identity. The two kind of pages could be marked by using colors: - a white author page (for example) would imply: name, disambiguation, unverified information - a light blue page: person (with year of birth, occupation, external links etc.), verified information Some thought probably needs to be given to what we would mean by verified. For example, we could mean we have found information about this author in another source, or we could mean we have enough evidence to be sure of this author's identity. My own feeling is that we should let the data speak for itself. If an author record contains birth and death dates and a couple of sameAs links to e.g. VIAF and dbpedia, then it is self-evidently more precise (and useful) than an entry containing just a name. Conversely, asserting that two records refer to the same individual will always be something of a judgement call. Across the whole of humanity, even name plus year of birth and death isn't going to guarantee a unique identity (though it may work well enough in the more limited context of people who have written books). We should probably be realistic about this: it appears that recording author birth and death dates is seen as a bit of a luxury in a bibliographic context. Only about 5% of the OL author records have this information: I have just under 350,000 records in my extracted dump (which does exclude living authors born after 1950). I notice that the VIAF API does not support searching by author birth or death date. Richard -- *Richard Light* ___ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-discuss] Zero works
This involves some careful thinking, not least because various culture workers have adopted a practice which questions the role of the author: Multiple names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-use_name Here a name may be used precisely to provoke ambiguity, and where a name is used in that fashion it should be noted. If there is reason to conclude that a particular book has been authored by a particular person, then I think it would be sensible if a reference to evidence for this is also included. all the best Fabian On 02/09/2013 03:30, Patrick Conley wrote: BTW: Imho it would be helpful if OL would distinguish between a person (an individual author) and a name (VIAF used the term undifferentiated). As Tom has mentioned, there is firstly a distinction to make between individuals and corporate bodies, meetings, etc. Once you know you're talking about individual authors, you can then get on to the issue of verification/identity. The two kind of pages could be marked by using colors: - a white author page (for example) would imply: name, disambiguation, unverified information - a light blue page: person (with year of birth, occupation, external links etc.), verified information Some thought probably needs to be given to what we would mean by verified. For example, we could mean we have found information about this author in another source, or we could mean we have enough evidence to be sure of this author's identity. My own feeling is that we should let the data speak for itself. If an author record contains birth and death dates and a couple of sameAs links to e.g. VIAF and dbpedia, then it is self-evidently more precise (and useful) than an entry containing just a name. Conversely, asserting that two records refer to the same individual will always be something of a judgement call. Across the whole of humanity, even name plus year of birth and death isn't going to guarantee a unique identity (though it may work well enough in the more limited context of people who have written books). We should probably be realistic about this: it appears that recording author birth and death dates is seen as a bit of a luxury in a bibliographic context. Only about 5% of the OL author records have this information: I have just under 350,000 records in my extracted dump (which does exclude living authors born after 1950). I notice that the VIAF API does not support searching by author birth or death date. Richard -- *Richard Light* ___ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org ___ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
