OCLC Authority Control Service

Eric, MacKenzie

You are the sponsors on this use case, so do you have any comments on the
points Nick raises?

"[ 073. ]
Summary: Differences in opinion about correct metadata in section 4.3
Raised By: Nick Matsakis
Status: open
Description: 

I'm also not sure whether the matter of differences of opinion on
"correct" metadata belongs here.  There is definitely authority work that
deals with ambiguity of that sort; for example the question of "Is this
work about that topic?"  However, it seems to me that most authority work
is concerned with the question of "Is this entity the same as that
entity?"  which generally has a simple answer --- though finding it can be
difficult when there is not enough information about the entities to make
an identification.

Instead, I would put the focus squarely on providing authority service in
SIMILE/DSpace's heterogenous data environment. I am not familiar with the
details of OCLC's authority service, but I suspect that it only works with
MARC metadata.  I expect that the more flexible DSpace environment will
bring with it challenges that these services aren't currently capable of
handling. An example of a substantial body of metadata that isn't
trivially translatable to MARC would be a good argument for  for providing
a new authority service that is able to work with more generic metadata.
Otherwise, Schema translation services may enable existing MARC-based
authority services to work with non-MARC metadata."

thanks

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 12:53:53 UTC