Names: Pilot national name and factual authority service
To reliably and uniquely identify individuals is a requirement that has been articulated across a number of areas of the Information Environment in recent years.
- For users of repositories of research outputs, it's important to be sure that all the materials submitted by an individual will be retrieved by a search on that person's name, without retrieving items that have been supplied by different people with similar or identical names
- For individuals submitting their work, it's important to be able to easily assign their own identifier to their materials and to be able to unambiguously identify their institution and department
Between July 2007 and September 2008, MIMAS and the British Library propose to scope the requirements of such a service and specify and develop a pilot which would test the processes concerned. This will include determining the data format, setting up an appropriate database, populating it with records from a variety of sources and testing the use of the data. This will provide important information about the future usefulness of a name authority service for institutional and subject-based repositories, and other applications beyond the repository sector.