[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Format of $0 identifiers for authority control

[Dan Scott]

Hi Jane:

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 4:59 PM, Jane Sandberg <sandbej at linnbenton.edu>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> When I authorize a heading in the cataloging interface, it adds a $0
> subfield in the form (LINN)190374, in which LINN is the name of my
> consortium, and 190374 is an identifier taken from the authority
> record's 001 field.  This links it to an authority record that we have
> imported from DLC.
>
> While this works fine for maintaining consistency within our
> consortium, it means that all our $0 fields are specific to us.  As
> library linked data conversations become ever more prominent, it seems
> like it would be very nice to add $0 subfields that mean something to
> people and machines outside our consortium.
>
> Maybe something like (LoC)n 2009034376, where it is clear that the
> authority data are coming from DLC, and with a searchable identifier
> that is taken from the 010$a.  Or even something like
> (uri)http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2009034376, which is what
> folks at George Washington University are doing [1].
>
> So has anybody else fiddled around with IDs in authority records?  Is
> there any way to change the org unit that is listed in parentheses, or
> to have multiple ones depending on the thesaurus or control set?
>
> Thanks so much for your help!  Happy weekend!
>
>    -Jane
>
>
> [1] http://bit.ly/1NR0rVa
>
>
Way back when I was initially fleshing out some of the stubs of authority
control support [1], my goal had been to support local authorities, with
the idea being that $0 (LINN)190374 would link to a publicly visible
authority record, which would in turn link to the LoC authority record. My
work was driven by an archives that was a source of authority records, so
local authority records were important.

I didn't get to the local authority linking to an external authorty,
obviously. We're currently not creating those links in the public
catalogue, and the only publicly visible authority records are currently
via supercat, which creates output like this:
https://laurentian.concat.ca/opac/extras/supercat/retrieve/marcxml/authority/607378

We could build a TPAC wrapper that displays authority records and embeds
linked data that points to external authorities (RDFa would be how I would
do it). So there would be one layer of indirection, which is reasonable in
the linked data world. I think it would take a lot more work to enable the
use and display of external authorities directly in bib records in
Evergreen, while still allowing the creation of local authorities.

You might want to add in some of your ideas to the relatively current
authorities wiki page [2]--it's a good resource, if you're not already
aware of that page.

Dan

1. http://wiki.evergreen-ils.org/doku.php?id=dev:proposal:authorities
2. http://wiki.evergreen-ils.org/doku.php?id=authorities
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