XML and authority control

Sunday, June 26th, I'll be a speaker at the LITA-ALCTS CCS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group's program XML and Authority Control that Manon Theroux of Yale organized.  It runs from 1:30-4:30 pm at the McCormick Place Convention Center, room S405.

I'll be talking primarily about a web service (more information here) that we've been running for a couple of years that gives access to the NACO authority file.

We developed this originally for the JISC funded ePrints UK project.  I don't think we ever really got hooked up during this project, but we took the same service and prototyped access from within DSpaces' metadata creation form, which didn't take much code at all.  The records come back ranked based on closeness of match to the authority records, and we've done some work on improving the ranking, but that's not exposed yet in the public service.

Here's the complete list of talks at the session:
1. “MADS (Metadata Authority Description Schema), a MODS Companion”
Sally H. McCallum, Chief, Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress
2. “XML for Authorities at NLM: the Groundwork for an Integrated Authority File”
Diane Boehr, Head of Cataloging, National Library of Medicine
3. “XML Name Access Control Repository at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Library”
Louisa Kwok, Head of Cataloging, HKUST Library
4. “Organic Authorities: XOBIS and the Metamorphosis of Library Data”
Kevin S. Clarke, Digital Projects Programmer, Firestone Library, Princeton University
5. “Web Service Experiments with Authority Control”
Thomas B. Hickey, Chief Scientist, OCLC
6. “Hong Kong Chinese Authority (Name) Project: the HKCAN XML Version”
Joanna Yi-hang Pong, Cataloguing Librarian, Run Run Shaw Library, City University of Hong Kong

Poul Jørgensen and his group at Portia have been doing some interesting things with RDF and authority files, and I hope to be able to show some of that on the 26th, too.

--Th

Update: Here are pointers to the presentations: http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/authorityalcts/2005annual.htm