A Cooperative “Identities Hub”
Amanda Hill announced on the Names Project Blog that OCLC is going to prototype a cooperative Identities Hub. Among the reasons for this project:
The current LC/NACO contributor model has severe limitations, both in who is enabled to add and edit authority records and the rules that constrain what information can be entered (even if the cataloger knows more information).The intellectual work that librarians who are not NACO contributors do in the course of creating bibliographic records is untapped.
There has been discussion of the need for such a project here among other places. I am glad to see the prototype moving forward.
This entry was posted on August 27, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under OCLC, authority data, identities. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
August 28, 2008 at 8:19 am
That’s what NACO is all about. It is called ‘authority work’ for a reason: authoritative versions of tracings are created and maintained here. For any institutions with the desire to contribute to the NACO authority file, training is available. It’s a big time commitment, and the learning curve is high. But that is critical to the success of the endeavor.
It’s one thing to see poor cataloging in WorldCat. It causes more work for everyone who later uses the bib record, but these records are fairly discreet, and even a bad record can typically be identified. As opposed to the commonly discreet nature of bib records, our authority records provide the infrastructure for our catalogs. Keeping that infrastructure in good working order is essential, if we want our catalogs to have full functionality. Were we to let anyone who desired to add to or revise our authority file, it would quickly become useless.
December 6, 2008 at 8:49 am
[...] Saved by czovekz on Thu 04-12-2008 OCLC FirstSearch Saved by whiteguy227 on Sun 23-11-2008 A Cooperative “Identities Hub” Saved by nlpcn on Sat 15-11-2008 Comment on OCLC – “from awareness to funding…” by Beth [...]