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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Am 27.08.2015 um 03:26 schrieb Karen Coyle: > > > On 8/26/15 3:17 PM, Thomas Berger wrote: >> LC records may be lacking explicit (especially death) dates, but >> they usually contain a wealth of textual references which more often >> than not reveal exact birth dates and other important contextual >> information (affiliations, notable works, places of birth, death >> and activity). > You say "usually," but I see "occasionally." As an example, here's the > LC authority record for me: > http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n89613425.marcxml.xml, and if you > can find "other important contextual information" you are a better > reader than I am. Sure I do. I "found: FRBR, before and after, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Karen Coyle) data view (Karen Coyle is a librarian with over 30 years' experience with library technology)" (probably you weren't aware the record was changed last week and human readers should prefer the text view < http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n89613425 > to grok in the information more easily. - From my personal experience I can tell that this exactly is the kind of information needed when e.g. having to decide whether this person could be identical with some E. K. Coyle, b. 1977 with a speciality in constitutional law. Much of it works over exclusion and having data (as opposed to text snippets as above) definitely will assist with preliminary filtering. In case of exact matching data sometimes doubts arise whether the records you're looking at already confuse different persons. Especially beware of other authority records citing LCauth records as source - they may have gotten it completely wrong! > Plus, when that information is available it's in a > note field and can be quite cryptic: > > "found:Phone call to Curbstone Press, 07-13-94(Michael H. Cooper is a > pseudonym of Michael Clark; b. 6-11-51; res. in Alaska)" > "found:Message from J. Baker, 11/08/88(Michael D. Cooper; b. 10/30/41) " Fortunately not in the same record... > Thomas, I think you are being overly optimistic about the state of > authority data today. I agree that it can get better, but I don't agre e > that VIAF extracts much "data" -- it basically gets what you can get > from a MARC name heading field, and adds in titles of works (which it > gets from the WorldCat database). There may be more information in > non-US authority files, but rather than relying on impressions it woul d > be better to have a good study of available data. Maybe I had been a bit sloppy but my intention was not talking about authority data but on information contained in authority records. From personal experience, and statements made by those involved with VIAF (like Thom Hickeys blog < http://outgoing.typepad.com/ >) I've gathered the firm conviction that in the Cooper example http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n94067387.html VIAF /does/ extract exact to the day birth dates from the variant heading "Clark, Michael, 1951 June 11-" in order to perform tie-breaking when needed. I mean, VIAF is all about data mining applied to library generated information and unfolds its use exactly in situations where suitable categorized data elements are lacking. In a world where authority records are in a better shape they would almost immediately find to each other based on the data they contain and we perhaps wouldn't even need something like VIAF... viele Gruesse Thomas Berger -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iJwEAQECAAYFAlXesioACgkQYhMlmJ6W47NoyAP+ODi+T6PKg+cEA4RLEyvJ8ZEJ JbXhSfhb4tgpqUASc/z8xyVxhfD0M2I3hbszfUw91O8dm+q7CKxd4mPw96pXf0on KCSY9fdfgCE/FPb5vV8RNLdQUlXWNIgeUXD6i3pedMRVoLjK+u4gfcp/2iL83Hzy mIT/jj9aLMZxziKtP7w= =cPrs -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----