Our Networking Names report has just been published! I was pleased to see this morning a number of tweets announcing it – or echoing other tweets.
I blogged last November about names touching everything soon after the Networking Names Advisory Group met together at the Met. The fifteen members of the advisory group have spent the time since refining fourteen use case scenarios, those that they were most knowledgeable about – academic libraries and scholars, archivists and archival users, and institutional repositories. These use case scenarios envisioned how different communities could benefit from aggregating information about persons and organizations, corporate and government bodies, and families, and making it available on a network level. From the use case scenarios we derived the functions and attributes of what would be needed for a “cooperative Identities Hub”.
Some of the components of a cooperative Identities Hub exist or are being developed. We wanted to articulate the characteristics of a gateway to all forms of names authorized or used in other contexts without preferring one form of name over another and that would use social networking to tap expertise in all communities. We envisioned a switch for users or their machine applications to extract relevant information for re-use in their own contexts and enable contributions from different sources. These are objectives we can all strive towards.
We’re looking at ways to amplify this work. Feel free to post your comments or reactions here in the meantime.
I am deeply grateful to all the RLG Partner staff who contributed to the report – a very talented group to work with: Grace Agnew (Rutgers), Laura Akerman (Emory), Genevieve Clavel (Swiss National Library), Joan Cobb (Getty Research Institute), Michele Crump (U. Florida), Amanda Hill (U. Manchester/UK Names Project), Deborah Kempe (Frick), Amy Lucker (New York University), Dennis Meissner (Minnesota Historical Society), Suzanne Pilsk (Smithsonian), Michael Rush (Yale), Jon Shaw (U. Pennsylvania), Laura Smart (CalTech), Daniel Starr (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Bob Wolven (Columbia).
Karen Smith-Yoshimura, senior program officer, topics related to creating and managing metadata with a focus on large research libraries and multilingual requirements. Karen retired from OCLC November 2020.
Maintaining a local archival name authority database is one of my primary responsibilities. I am very much interested in this proposed project.