Personal Authorities

The author is a fairly natural means to bounce from a document to another. At the global level, several international standards exist (Viaf, Isni, Orcid, etc.) that are maintained by different entities, for specific purposes and offering complementary services, most of them being synchronized with one another. In France, two national repositories coexist and are synchronized on the part of the data they have in common. One is maintained by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the other, IdRef, by the Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES). We chose the second one because it better matched the population of Persée authors.

Alignment with IdRef – a mutual enhancement

Two alignment procedures have been put in place. The  first is manual: each time a new author appears during the processing of a collection, a query is made in IdRef and provides a list of candidate authorities in response. When the information specialist identifies the author with certainty, he/she selects the right candidate, thus establishing a link. The second procedure is automatic: as part of the Qualinca project (Quality and interoperability of major documentary catalogues) in which ABES has set up tools to provide for alignments. An extract of the data produced by Persée (author, lists of contributions) is thus compared with the content managed by ABES to produce new alignments.

In addition to establishing links between the records describing persons in each of our information systems, the partnership with ABES aims to mutually improve data. During manual or automatic alignment procedures, any inconsistency or conflict is reported and analysed. The data from one or the other of the two reference files are then completed and/or corrected.

The strength of linked data

This first Persée/IdRef alignment is also used by the Persée team to establish new links to other repositories (BNF, Isni, Viaf, Wikipedia, etc.) that enhance Persée information system and improve its consistency, because, once again, anomalies are analyzed, reported to the institutions that maintain these repositories and corrected.