All entries for Tuesday 15 January 2008

Unique identifiers for authors

Writing about web page http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-ibm-and-verisign-to-join-openid/

One of the things that we need in our repositories is a way to identify an author: the same person might have published an article as, eg J. Slater in one journal, and as John Slater in another, and be listed according to the journal's author naming convention and how would we know that they were the same author?

This is a matter that we can try to deal with internally to our institutional repository by using an ID unique to the University for authors. But how would repository aggregators or cross searchers be able to de-duplicate and sort records when someone searches by author?

There are some interesting moves afoot to assign authors standard numbers, a bit like ISBNs for books. I also rather like the idea that we might all have OpenID usernames that we can use across different services.

Jenny Delasalle : 15 Jan 2008 15:26 |  Tags: Authors |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem