Identities and authorities

Jakob had some interesting comments on a recent post.  Among other things he is interested in the relationship between WorldCat Identities and authority files.

Those of you familiar with WorldCat may understand that until a few years ago the Library of Congress/NACO authority file was the official source of the controlled form for names.  This has changed, however, as OCLC adds metadata from sources outside the English speaking world.  Now, if the language of the metadata is not English, you can no longer assume that the form of the name follows the NACO file. OCLC is in the process of loading a number of national bibliographic files and the records are not merged with existing records even if we can identify the records as describing the same manifestation. Notice that it is the language of the metadata that is important, not the language of the item being described.  Not all that subtle a point, but one that is sometimes confusing.

Back to Jakob's first question — what is the relationship of WorldCat Identities to the LC/NACO authority file?  The Identity pages are extracted from WorldCat, so any unique string (after normalization) will result in a separate page, except when we have been able to map it to a more standard form.  This mapping is done using information gleaned from the NACO file.  We are also mapping German names into NACO names using preliminary matches provided by the VIAF project.  In an ideal world the pages would then display using the form of name appropriate to your locale, but right now they display using the NACO form.  We'll be folding in a more international view as our work with VIAF progresses.  We hope to add links to the German PND file of personal name authorities fairly soon.

--Th