Lead an effort to upgrade the LC/NACO Authority File with non-Latin alternate names

The major authority record exchange partners (British Library, Library and Archives Canada, Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and OCLC) have agreed to a plan that will allow for the addition of non-Latin characters in references on name authority records distributed as part of the NACO program in 2008. This will allow users, for the first time, to look up Arabic-, Chinese-, Cyrillic-, Greek-, Hebrew-, Japanese-, and Korean-script names in those scripts without knowing their romanizations and to correctly identify authors who write in those scripts.

OCLC Programs and Research will pre-populate the LC/NACO Authority File with non-Latin references derived from the non-Latin bibliographic heading fields in WorldCat, using the same data-mining techniques developed for WorldCat Identities which already includes non-Latin script “alternate names”. (See, for example, the Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew scripts represented in the WorldCat Identity for Sun Yat-sen.) Harvesting non-Latin heading forms that correspond to entities in the authority file will provide an immediate value for the authority file, based on the significant intellectual work of the many libraries that have provided non-Latin headings on bibliographic records for over two decades. We expect to add more than 500,000 non-Latin references to name authority records, a significant re-use of existing metadata in new contexts. The number of non-Latin script alternate names will be expanded by the non-Latin script forms included in the Bibliothèque national de France authority file after it is added to the Virtual International Authority File.

All NACO contributors will have the opportunity to review and verify the non-Latin script forms as part of their normal workflow. Catalogers will be better able to reflect on past practices related to non-Latin headings, and be in a better position to recommend future best practices for the LC/NACO Authority file.

For additional information about this effort, contact Karen Smith-Yoshimura.