Re: Issue 3 - Trust Mechanisms in OCLC Authority Control Service

Hi Mark,

I guess I do agree with Dave on this, and I think OCLC is already thinking
along these lines too, however they imagined that the central authority
might be able to invoke those locally-defined authority files if they failed
to find a match in their central authority file... Either way, we know for
certain that global/central authority files won't be sufficient for normalizing
names in DSpace/SIMILE-type systems, since so many of the authors
are first-time publishers who won't have established name authority
records, so we do need to come up with some mechanism to allow for
less-authoritative (or trusted) sources.

MacKenzie/

At 01:51 PM 5/21/2003 +0100, Butler, Mark wrote:
>Hi team,
>
>please can I have some comments, particularly from MacKenzie, on this issue
>from Dave Reynolds. Specifically, do the PIs agree with Dave that this is
>should be part of the OCLC use case?
>
>thanks, M
>
>[ 003. ]
>Summary: Trust mechanisms in OCLC Authority Control Service
>Raised By: Dave Reynolds
>Status: open
>Description:
>
>The OCLC Authority Control Service use case is interesting. I wonder is this
>could be framed as a test case for trust mechanisms. Supposing that entry
>validation against authority files could be made much more decentralized.
>Local
>communities would be free to adopt small, locally controlled authority files
>and
>services. Entries could be checked against those as well as the central or
>global authority services. Such entries would include, in their provenance
>information, the authority files used (perhaps with an optional
>cryptographic
>signature). Thus one could support multiple alternative field values with
>different levels of authority, future mappings between overlapping authority
>files can then be applied retrospectively. Seems like there could be a value
>to
>users of having local, easy to update authority files for some fields.

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-208
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie@mit.edu

Received on Sunday, 25 May 2003 17:24:28 UTC