[Text ] VIAF Workshop

On the 25th of February, the Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg was host to the VIAF Workshop, an event sponsored by OCLC and hosted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Approximately 80 delegates attended it.

The workshop’s first objective was to increase participant awareness and knowledge of current, possible roles and uses of VIAF in the international data exchange ecosystem. VIAF is regarded as a threshold into the World Wide Web for library authority data. VIAF allows authority data to be used by projects not necessarily focused on the library community and to be enriched and consolidated by these projects. So, VIAF becomes the common factor of and a hub for different projects for various uses and allows these projects to be interoperable, which is very important in a linked data-oriented perspective.

VIAF has been launched as a research project as well as a tool useful for cataloguing. Nowadays, the research aspect remains a main issue for VIAF, which is implemented by VIAF itself or by various projects around it; but the possible VIAF data uses have been increasingly widened. Consequently, the workshop is focused on the topic of roles of authority data, e.g. trustworthy data, with the background of dynamic data, coming in and out of the library world.

[Link] Click here for VIAF Workshop programme

[Documents/slides ] Slides from the Workshop

The Current State of VIAF, by Thom Hickey (.ppt)

Governance and Orientations for VIAF in the Future Vincent Boulet(.ppt)

SNAC & NAAC Social Network and Archival Context & National Archival Authorities Cooperative Daniel Pitti(.ppt)

ISNI International Standard Name Identifier - Janifer Gatenby, EMEA Program Manager Metadata, OCLC Pauline Chougnet, BnF, ISNI Quality Team(.ppt)

Wikipedia - Max Klein, Wikipedia in residence in OCLC(.ppt)

VIAF Partners, BnF Pauline Chougnet(.ppt)

VIAF Partners , DNB Barbara Pfeifer(.ppt)

[Document, text] Conclusions and Follow Up - Vincent Boulet (.doc)