VIAF Council Meeting Minutes

National Library of Finland, Helsinki, Finland

Friday, August 10, 2012

  1. Welcome and Introductions

Attendees:

EditaLichtenbergova (Czech Republic - NKC)

RadwaElmenabbawi (Egypt – BA)

Vincent Boulet, Françoise Bourdon (France – BnF)

Barbara Pfeifer, Lars Swenson, BrigitteWiechmann (Germany – DNB)

TadahikoOshiba (Japan – NDL)

LeszekŚnieżko (Poland – NUKAT)

InešCordeiro, Rosa Galvão (Portugal – PTBNP)

Ricardo Santos Muñoz (Spain – BNE)

Miriam Säfström(Sweden - SELIBR)

Barbara Tillett, Beacher Wiggins (United States – LC)

Ted Fons, JaniferGatenby, Thom Hickey, Ed, O’Neill, Glenn Patton (OCLC)

Observers:

Juha Hakala and 5 other observers from the National Library of Finland

Barbara Tillett, who served as chair for this initial meeting of the VIAF Council, thanked the National Library of Finland for their hospitality and for their assistance in making arrangements for the meeting. She then asked Thom Hickey to give an update on VIAF activities.

  1. VIAF Update

Thom presented the update based on the PowerPoint presentation which appears as Attachment 1 to these minutes. He noted that 16 of the existing contributors have signed the new agreements with 5 more in the process of being signed. Some small wording changes have been required in individual agreements in order to achieve signature. Thom also reported on 8 files that are various stages of processing and notes an additional list of institutions that are prospective contributors.

He reported that browser usage is up 75% over the past year and API usage is up 400%. Uniform titles have been integrated into VIAF since the last meeting and 3 additional files (BIBSYS, SUDOC and VLACC) have been added. These additions bring the total number of authority records to 29 million in 22 million clusters. A total of 112 million bibliographic records are used to support VIAF processing.

Thom also reported on a number of other VIAF changes which have happened over the past year, including the beginning of the integration of VIAF into other OCLC services and the use of Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-BY) license for public downloads of VIAF data. He noted that the systemsometimes imposes limits of the number of simultaneous users by IP range and asked that contributors let him know if this poses a problem for your institution’s use of VIAF. He also noted that redaction procedures are now in place to deal with persons to object to the form of name or presence of dates. Several contributors asked that these problems be reported back to the contributor.

  1. Plans for the Coming Year

Thom continued with a report of plans for the coming year and a number of proposals for additional actions. He noted that VIAF will be moved soon to a Hadoop/Hbase platform which will bring more processing power and speed.

  1. Wikipedia in VIAF

Thom then described a proposal for more interaction between VIAF and Wikipedia (see attachment 2 to these minutes). Currently, preliminary matching based on dates, titles and ISBNs has resulted on the inclusion of about 250,000 Wikipedia links in VIAF. It is proposed to get those links into Wikipedia articles also, using only Wikipedia personal names that match a VIAF entity. This would allow use of Wikipedia’s disambiguation stage, resulting in more and better matches as well as better clustering. In the discussion that followed, the attendees agreed to start with personal names that are already in VIAF. It was also agreed that the project should start with English Wikipedia but OCLC was encouraged to work with German Wikipedia also.

  1. Scholars Funnel in VIAF

Thom updated attendees on the Syriac Reference Portal and Fihrist Islamic Manuscripts projects that have been described in previous VIAF meetings (see attachment 2 to these minutes). Based on these two projects, OCLC would like to explore a generalized Scholars Funnel for VIAF that provide a way for specialized communities (language, script, geographic or subject areas) to share their expertise. The discussion touched on the need for appropriate licensing and for enduring rights to use the data as well as provision for maintenance after a project (and/or its funding) might come to an end. The consensus was that it is worth experimenting with other projects beyond these two before reaching a final decision on their status within VIAF.

  1. VIAF and ISNI Interoperation

Françoise Bourdon (BnF) and JaniferGatenby (OCLC Leiden) presented an update on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729) based on their discussion paper which was distributed along with the meeting agenda (see attachment 3 to these minutes) and a PowerPoint presentation (see attachment 4 to these minutes). They reviewed progress in the implementation of the ISNI database and the uses which that database makes of VIAF data. In addition to the library data from VIAF, ISNI also aggregates data from educational institutions, commercial sources and rights management organizations. As a result, ISNI processing can identify problems in VIAF source data and/or in VIAF clustering. These problems can be reported back to VIAF and to the individual contributors for resolution. Janifer recommended several actions that VIAF contributors should take: they should plan to ingest ISNIs into their local files, to act on specific notifications of problems (including review of records), to code records for undifferentiated personal names appropriately and to insure that cases in which a record containing an ISNI is split into multiple identities are reported to the VIAF file. In the discussion that followed, it was noted that, while making use of the ISNI reports could certainly benefit VIAF contributors’ individual files as well as the VIAF file as a whole, the additional maintenance could pose a significant burden on the contributors, especially initially. Some investigation is needed as to how much might be done automatically. That might allow contributors to build on what they are already doing in resolving problem situations. It was also questioned whether it is necessary to have ISNIs in all of the individual files. Would incorporating them into VIAF (as is planned) be enough to allow contributors’ record IDs to be linked to ISNIs through VIAF IDs?

  1. ARROW

Françoise Bourdon also reported briefly on the current status of the ARROW project. The project ends in 2013 and work is in process to define a legal entity to assume responsibility at that time. There is now one user of ARROW, a database of out-of-print French books. They are using ARROW to determine the legal status of materials still in copyright. ARROW uses VIAF to bring together various forms of name and uses birth date information in determining legal status. The future of the project seems uncertain since it is proving difficult to find a business model to sustain the database.

  1. Election

The Council then turned to the election of officers. As noted in the agenda, the plan was to elect a Chair (whose term begins at the end of the 2012 meeting and ends at the 2013 meeting) and a Chair-elect (whose term will begin at the 2013 meeting and ends at the 2014 meeting). At the 2013 meeting, a new chair-elect will then be elected. The following nominations were received: for Chair: Vincent Boulet (BnF); and for Chair-elect: Brigitte Wiechmann (DNB). Both were elected unanimously.

  1. Role of the VIAF Council

The Council briefly discussed the current statement and suggested that there be further discussion during the coming year.

  1. Criteria for Joining VIAF

The group discussed the statement which was distributed as an attachment to the meeting agenda (see Attachment 5 to these minutes). In light of the discussion about the potential of a generalized Scholars Funnel, questions were raised about what is meant by “a substantial authority file”. It was suggested that wording that conveyed “data of interest to the community” or “of value to the community” might be incorporated into the existing statement.

  1. Issues

The Council discussed a number of issues raised either in Thom’s VIAF update or during the meeting:

VIAF Reports: As noted in both Thom’s update and in the ISNI update, there is the potential to generate lots of reports that might assist VIAF contributors in resolving problems in their own files (problems with mixed identities, date anomalies, etc.). But the volume of these reports might have the potential to overwhelm. Thom agreed to send more information to VIAF-L and solicit input on what reports institutions would like to see and what they would be able to handle.

Geographic Names, etc.:In response to Thom’s questions about the priority of adding additional entities such as geographic names, deities, fictional characters or ships, the consensus seemed to be to concentrate first on getting more uniform titles into the VIAF file because of their importance in FRBR.

Implications of RDA implementations: Both the DNB and the BnF noted potential changes in practices related to pseudonyms and asked about the implications for VIAF and ISNI. The practice of separate identities (and records) does not present problems for either file.

  1. Task Groups

Finally, the Council then discussed the formation of task groups that would follow up on a number of issues raised during the discussions. The following topics were suggested:

  • Criteria for joining VIAF
  • Role of the VIAF Council
  • Election procedures
  • Future directions for VIAF
  • Linked data
  • Public presence of and advocacy for VIAF
  • Privacy issues
  • Definition of a structure for scholars funnels and other special projects
  • New entities for VIAF
  • Interoperability of formats

Following discussion, these topics were consolidated into five broad categories:

  1. Criteria for joining VIAF, future directions for VIAF, definition of a structure for scholars and other special projects, new entities for VIAF
  2. role of the VIAF council, election procedures
  3. linked data, interoperability of formats
  4. public presence of and advocacy for VIAF
  5. Privacy issues

It was suggested that no more that 2 of these broad categories be selected as a focus for the coming year. The Chair of VIAF Council will propose a method and a schedule for setting up the task groups.

Prepared by Glenn Patton based on notes from Barbara Tillett