3 Comments on “Identity management beyond the LC/NACO Authority File”

  1. Hi Patricia!

    I went back through the responses for this session to confirm I hadn’t missed something. Only one response mentioned Getty vocabularies by name. This was a fairly small group and I’d expect to see them in a wider set of responses. Certainly, Getty vocabularies have exactly the kind of governance and reliability that metadata managers are looking for when choosing additional vocabularies.

    Thanks for re-sharing the link to your DEI presentation!

    1. Within the Getty Vocabularies, ULAN is problematic for identity management. For artists, it’s ok. But for art dealers, galleries and other owners, its quality as a linked data source is poor. It mixes in the most confusing way persons with organisations so that matching and linking with other better managed sources is problematic. It even groups several persons in a single ULAN record for a “person” marked “composite record”. (see: http://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500440140 ). URIs are not a stable as they should be. It also omits far too many names to be a useful source in areas such as Nazi-looted art. This is an ongoing problem which deserves to be analysed in depth.

  2. Thanks, Richard, for the interesting article! We hope that the ULAN and the other Getty Vocabularies could increasingly be used in addition to other authority resources by the Library community. It seems that coreferences between resources is our path to a more inclusive future. At a few OCLC venues, we’ve been giving updates on our own efforts to increase multicultural, unbiased, and inclusive content of the Getty Vocabularies, e.g., https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/Vocabs_unbiased_terminology.pdf Patricia Harpring, Managing Editor, Getty Vocabularies

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