Friday, November 2, 2018

What's up with identity management?

A recent post The coverage of Identity Management work by Karen Smith-Yoshimura in OCLC's Hanging Together blog highlights developments in the probable shift in cataloging practice from "authority control" to "identity management". To put it most simply, our efforts to differentiate creators and correctly correlate their output would shift from constructing a unique text string for each entity to associating the entity with a unique identifier in the form of a URI. Movement towards identity management specifically aligns with the PCC's Strategic Direction 4 "Accelerate the movement toward ubiquitous identifier creation and identity management at the network level"  (https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/about/PCC-Strategic-Directions-2018-2021.pdf, page 5).

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging's ISNI Pilot  represents one venue to explore the possibilities of identity management in the context of cataloging. Association of creators with URIs will ease the transition of bibliographic data into a BIBFRAME/linked data environment. The presentations given at the PCC Participant's meeting at ALA Annual in New Orleans provide an overview of the project and examples of project participant's experiences.

Identity management also has the potential to facilitate authority control in the context of journal literature and institutional repositories. How should catalogers provide authority control for journal article authors? Name identifiers in the linked data world (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 54:8, p. 537-552 (2016) examined the possibilities for using several sources of author identifiers available through international authority databases.  ORCID recently invited feedback on a draft recommendation for ORCID in repositories and is evaluating the use of identifiers for organizations. A recent paper published by JISC explores the potential of Persistent Identifiers to track scholarly work through the research life-cycle, linking the work of researchers with institutions, funding and publication. The focus of the paper is on OA workflows, but the use of PIDs should be applicable across both OA and paid publications.







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