The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is an international

authority file In information science, authority control is a process that organizes information, for example in library catalogs, by using a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or an identifier (generally Persistent identifier, persistent and Alpha ...

. It is a joint project of several national libraries, operated by the

Online Computer Library Center OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

(OCLC).

History

Discussions about having a joint international authority started in the late 1990s. After several failed attempts to develop a unique joint authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities. This would present all the benefits of a standard file without requiring a significant investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the American

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

(LOC), the

German National Library The German National Library (DNB; ) is the central archival library and national bibliographic centre for the Federal Republic of Germany. It is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its task is to collect, permanently archive, comprehens ...

(DNB), and the OCLC in April 1998 as a proof-of-concept that authority records can be linked. After extensive testing, the VIAF consortium was formed at the 2003 World Library and Information Congress, hosted by the International Federation of Library Associations. on 6 August 2003, and by September it had its own page at the OCLC website. The (BnF) joined the project on 5 October 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on 4 April 2012. The aim is to link the national authority files (such as the German

Integrated Authority File The (translated as ''Integrated Authority File'') or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used mainly for documentation in libraries and ...

) to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original documents, and refers to the original authority records. The data is made available online and is available for research and, data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the

Open Archives Initiative The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives t ...

Protocol for Metadata Harvesting The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI- ...

(OAI-PMH) protocol. The file numbers are also being added to

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

biographical articles and are incorporated into

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...

. Christine L. Borgman groups VIAF with the International Standard Name Identifier and

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication. This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scien ...

systems, describing all three as "loosely coordinated efforts to standardize name forms". Borgman characterizes all three systems as attempts to solve the problem of

author name disambiguation Author name disambiguation is the process of disambiguation and record linkage applied to the names of individual people. The process could, for example, distinguish individuals with the name "John Smith". An editor may apply the process to schol ...

, which has grown in scale as the quantity of

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

multiplies. She notes that VIAF, unlike the other two systems, is led by libraries, as opposed to individual authors or creators.

VIAF clusters

VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month. As more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records.

Participating libraries and organizations

Libraries added for testing purposes

References

Sources

External links

*
VIAF
at

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

{{Authority control Identifiers Library cataloging and classification Library of Congress OCLC