Musings on authority control

One thing that I find very frustrating with the EPrints software used to host our institutional repository is the way it represents authors. Or in fact, doesn't represent authors. It seems fairly obvious that the best implementation would be to have a sort of 'identity' for an author with some distinguishing features: a unique reference for example. EPrints attempts to create this with their e-mail address and homepage fields. But this is fairly useless. E-mail addresses can be written with lower or uppercase letters, an author may have multiple e-mail addresses, or just multiple forms of e-mail address. And authors publish under a multitude of different names. I am continually faced with the dilemma: if Smith, J. the same as Smith, J. A.? And are they the same as Smith, John, or Smith John A., or Smith J. A. (John A.)? The only way of finding out is to perform a search on EPrints to find out what else that author has published that we have in our database. This can be tricky for someone who combines multiple research areas. What is needed is a record for each author. This record would begin with a unique identifier, perhaps a reference number, or perhaps, in the semantic web era, a web address. This record could maintain a list of publication forms. It could also give information about their department, career history, etc.

But hang on, am I just re-inventing the wheel here? Isn't this what a Library of Congress authority file is? But the key is that a lot of Warwick academics do not have their own authority record. So, is there something out there does a better job than the Library of Congress for British academics?

A few months ago I met with a member of the Names project - a JISC-funded collaboration between Mimas and the British Library (http://names.mimas.ac.uk/). I discovered that the team are, in effect, creating a British version of Library of Congress authorities, for use with institutional repositories. They have realised that there is a need for an authority service for UK academics, many of whom will not have their own LC heading because they only publish in journals. And they have also realised that each institutional repository already provides a wealth of information about who UK academics are, and what areas they publish in. By writing algorithms to try and match academics with the same name who publish research in the same subject area, they can automatically create a list of unique authors. I'm waiting with interest to see how their project goes.

I've also just been made aware of initiative: ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) (http://orcid.org/). ORCID are aiming to produce an independent registry of academics, giving each their own unique identifier which can be linked to all their research output. It aims to 'transcend discipline, geographic, national and institutional, boundaries' and therefore has a much broader scope than the UK based Names. I am led to believe there is also a higher integration with the Library of Congress name authorities, something that is important to us at Warwick as we already use them where possible.

I believe the initiative behind both these projects is much needed in the future of research on the web, and I will be watching their progress with interest.