Cornell University Library, in partnership with the Library of Congress, OCLC, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the ORCID organization, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Social Networks and Archival Context Cooperative, the BIBFLOW project, Stanford University Library and Harvard Library will hold a national forum on issues concerning local name authorities. Name authority files provide unique identifiers and records for people to ensure consistency in creation of descriptive metadata. Libraries create local authorities to serve a variety of purposes, usually within an institutional context; but these authorities have significant potential for reuse at other cultural heritage organizations and beyond. The April 2015 IMLS National Digital Platform Forum report emphasized the importance of enabling technologies (e.g., interoperability via linked data) and radical collaborations in supporting the mission of the cultural heritage sector. Our forum aims to bring together stakeholders working on shared local authorities in order to develop a shared understanding of the key issues. One of the goals of the project is to articulate those issues in a white paper that can serve as the basis for future work.
The first meeting of the IMLS Shareable Authorities Forum will take place at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY on October 24-25, 2016. Please address inquiries to cnc53[at]cornell.edu.
This project is funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) : https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-73-16-0040-16