 | |
| Acronym | VIAF |
|---|---|
| Organisation | OCLC |
| Introduced | 6 August 2003 |
| Example | 106965171 |
| Website | viaf |
The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries & operated by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). [1]
Discussions about having a joint international authority started in the late 1990s. After several failed attempts to develop a unique joint authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities. This would present all the benefits of a standard file without requiring a significant investment of time and expense in the process. [2]
The project was initiated by the American Library of Congress (LOC), the German National Library (DNB), and the OCLC in April 1998 as a proof-of-concept that authority records can be linked. [3] After extensive testing, the VIAF consortium was formed at the 2003 World Library and Information Congress, hosted by the International Federation of Library Associations. [4] on 6 August 2003, [5] [6] and by September it had its own page at the OCLC website. [7] The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) joined the project on 5 October 2007.
The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on 4 April 2012. [8]
The aim is to link the national authority files (such as the German Integrated Authority File) to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original documents, and refers to the original authority records. The data is made available online and is available for research and, data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) protocol.
The file numbers are also being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. [9] [10]
Christine L. Borgman groups VIAF with the International Standard Name Identifier and ORCID systems, describing all three as "loosely coordinated efforts to standardize name forms". [11] Borgman characterizes all three systems as attempts to solve the problem of author name disambiguation, which has grown in scale as the quantity of data multiplies. [11] She notes that VIAF, unlike the other two systems, is led by libraries, as opposed to individual authors or creators. [11]
VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month. As more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. [12]
| English Wikipedia entry name | Identifier | Native-language name | Location | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lithuanian National Library | LIH | Lithuanian : Lietuvos nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo biblioteka | Vilnius | Lithuania |
| National and University Library of Slovenia / COBISS | SIMACOB | Slovene : Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, NUK | Ljubljana | Slovenia |
The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a reference model from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems interconnection." In the OSI reference model, the communications between systems are split into seven different abstraction layers: Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application.
OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, then became the Online Computer Library Center as it expanded. In 2017, the name was formally changed to OCLC, Inc. OCLC and thousands of its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries pay for the many different services it offers. OCLC also maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.
In information science, authority control is a process that organizes information, for example in library catalogs, by using a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or an identifier for each topic or concept. The word authority in authority control derives from the idea that the names of people, places, things, and concepts are authorized, i.e., they are established in one particular form. These one-of-a-kind headings or identifiers are applied consistently throughout catalogs which make use of the respective authority file, and are applied for other methods of organizing data such as linkages and cross references. Each controlled entry is described in an authority record in terms of its scope and usage, and this organization helps the library staff maintain the catalog and make it user-friendly for researchers.
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The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an identifier system for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, television programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of 16 digits. It can optionally be displayed as divided into four blocks.
The ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic output.
Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS) is an XML schema developed by the United States Library of Congress' Network Development and Standards Office that provides an authority element set to complement the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS).
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A persistent identifier is a long-lasting reference to a document, file, web page, or other object.
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Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) is a general use controlled vocabulary based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). FAST is developed as a part of WorldCat by OCLC, Inc., with the goal of making subject cataloging less costly and easier to implement in online contexts. FAST headings separate topical data from non-topical data, such as information about a document's form, chronological coverage, or geographical coverage.
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VIAF cluster ID (P214) (see uses )