[Web4lib] Authors name standardization. Your opinion?

[Karen Coyle]

Matthias Steffens wrote:
> As a scientist and programmer of a bibliographic web application, I
> must admit that it's completely elusive to me why the big publishers
> (and/or libraries) have not pushed the development of a unique and
> universal author ID system until yet -- similar to what has been
> achieved with DOIs.(*)
>
>
>   
An author ID would solve part of the problem -- that is, it could make 
it explicit that author 1234567 wrote both article A and article P, at 
least in a situation where the author ID was attached to both articles. 
It doesn't solve the problem of moving from a human-readable (and often 
ambiguous) citation like "JS Smith" to the ability to retrieve articles 
by that precise author -- who could be John Stevens Smith or Jane Smiley 
Smith, or any of a number of other individuals with that moniker. 
Somehow we still have to get people from an individual non-unique name 
to an author. This is in part an issue of legacy data, which does not 
have unique IDs (and there's a lot of it). There's also an interesting 
issue of assigning the IDs: who does it, what guarantees that they get 
it right, etc.?

Although identifiers might be part of a solution, they rarely are the 
solution itself.

kc

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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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