[Web4lib] Authors name standardization. Your opinion?

[Lars Aronsson]

Julie Nye wrote:

> Isn't there a "party identifier" scheme under discussion now that would
> do essentially this, for personal and corporate authors?
> 
> http://collectionscanada.ca/iso/tc46sc9/27729.htm

Interesting.  Even though it isn't spelled out, I predict that the 
proposed ISPI scheme will be financed with fees from publishers, 
much like the existing ISBN and DOI schemes.  The purpose seems to 
be to make the job easier for RIAA, IFPI etc. to collect royalties 
from sales.  This will put the system out of reach for many kinds 
of uses, including the assignment of ISPIs to out-of-copyright and 
out-of-fee (Creative Commons) authors, since nobody is going to 
pay the fees for them.  On the other hand, the fees and 
connections to collection of royalties makes it easier to handle 
the "data protection" (privacy) issues, since the publishers or 
collection societies will be certain to get the consent of the 
registered persons.


Meanwhile, the national libraries of Germany and the Czech 
Republic already use ID numbers for authority files in their 
national union library catalogs.  These numbers are used as 
reference in Wikipedia's German and Czech articles.  See for 
example at the very lower right of the article on Karel Čapek,
http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%C4%8Capek
where you find the logotype of the "NK" (Czech national library) 
and the link "Seznam děl" (Catalog).  To see the wiki source, 
click "editovat" just above and see the template macro
{{NK ČR|jk01021023}} which gives the ID jk01021023 for this 
person.

In the corresponding German article,
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%C4%8Capek
at the very end, you find a weblink to "Literatur von und über 
Karel Čapek im Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek".  Click 
"bearbeiten" to see the wiki source code {{PND|118668250}} that
gives the Personennamendatei ID for him.

And of course, using my old template Extraktor script, you can get 
complete lists of Wikipedia articles that use these templates.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se