The Virtual International Authority File

Expanding the concept of universal bibliographic control

By Thomas Hickey

The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is a cooperative project initiated by the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and OCLC to match and make available a merged view of authority files from around the world. Authority files contain lists and explanations of names and terms used by libraries to ensure that their collections are described in a consistent manner. VIAF is currently concentrating on personal names, but we have also done work on geographic names. As of August 2009, VIAF consists of names drawn from 16 authority files from 13 participating national libraries, with over 10 million names in the resulting file. A user interface to VIAF is available here.

One of the goals of VIAF is to lower the cost of authority control in libraries by making it easier to see how major authority files have treated names. Beyond that, we hope to support both cross-language and, possibly even more importantly, cross-script searching and display. For instance, it should be possible to search for Twain, Твен or טוין, retrieve materials about Mark Twain and be able to read the names associated with them in your preferred script.

While VIAF’s target audience is librarians who deal with international materials, our goals for enhanced searching overlap with those of the Semantic Web. To support this, VIAF is available as linked data, supporting machine as well as Web browser access.

We make the links that form the basis of the virtual authority file by collecting personal name authority records and their associated bibliographic metadata. This lets us match names not only on the name itself and any cross-references in the authority records, but to also use information found in bibliographic records about which works a person has written. Among other pieces of data, we look for ISBNs, publisher names and co-authors to help sort out exactly who is who. With many millions of names, even fairly uncommon names can represent multiple people, and we do our best to link people across files without making links we are not quite sure about. To make a link we need to have matching birth and death years, or other supporting information such as a title or co-author in common or sometimes a combination of partial matches on several different fields. The enriched VIAF records created as the result of all this matching bring together more information than exists in any single authority record.

We are very pleased with the millions of links we have been able to create between names. This was possible only because of the huge amount of effort libraries have invested in bibliographic control for decades. One of the greatest challenges libraries face is to make their metadata visible and useful on the Web. VIAF is part of this larger effort by libraries and OCLC to make our collective data work on the‘network level.’

ISNI: Bridging publisher and library names

OCLC and the VIAF are playing a key role in the development and deployment of ISNI, a new identifier standard for names. The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) will provide a means to uniquely identify the publicly facing names of authors, composers and other creators, fictional and historical characters and rights holders, particularly publishers. Such an authoritative identifier will serve as a link for occurrences of an identity across databases on the Web and make it easier to relate names used by publishers to those used in libraries.

The ISNI is expected to become operational in 2010. A management consortium is being proposed, led by CISAC (International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) consisting of rights and trade organizations and libraries.

ISNIs will be initially assigned by matching records supplied from the consortium members and we have successfully conducted a series of tests using the VIAF file and its underlying matching processes. It is anticipated that around 3 million ISNIs could be assigned and ready for diffusion from day 1.

A display of the VIAF record for Anton Chekhov. Multiple forms of names for this person are shown, and relationships among sources of the forms are graphically displayed.

Making the transition to a truly global cooperative | WorldCat Local “quick start”