Linking research & learning technologies through standards

We have posted about the fluidity of researcher identity, and approaches to identity which acknowledge that fluidity—the NicNames project’s in particular. That post discussed the profusion of identities authors now have online, and presumed that those identities need to be deduplicated, and gathered together so that all the author’s work can be aligned to the one identity—even if we do not presume a notion of primary identity.

But the researcher does not always want their disparate identities tethered together. The pseudonym has long been a literary convention, dissected by literary historians (and authority files). Now it is a mainstay of the blogosphere, where a far amount of scholarly writing takes place; and people are well-attuned to the distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous writing. Internet sleuthing can work out the connections between online identities, just as literary scholars have been doing. That doesn’t mean the authors appreciate if you do. There may be an objective reality about an author’s identity, beyond the fluid consensus of authorities. But fluidity may suit the author just fine, because authors want control over their own identity.

We have mentioned NicNames as an approach to dealing with multiple author identities. The other initiative to mention is an outcome of the UKOLN/DRIVER workshop on international repository infrastructure, held in March. One of the infrastructure tasks the workshop faced was how to establish interoperability between repository identifiers internationally, whether they be identifiers for repository objects, or for authors. At a basic level, repository identifiers from the various available schemes—URL, Handle, PURL, XRI—are already interoperable, since all of them are usable under HTTP. But interoperability is a real problem when it comes to what representations the identifiers resolve to, or how to get a service to operate on identifiers from a huge number of different schemes.

Outside their associated services, though, identifiers are just names associated with things, and the workshop came up with a simple solution to identifier interoperability—which ANDS will take the lead in implementing, as presented at the OAI6 workshop in June. The solution is, have authorities assert that two identifiers are pointing to the same thing. This will allow you to translate queries involving one to queries involving the other, without having to build an extra service layer on top of the existing identifier services.

For author identifiers in particular, the identifiers will be the different tokens associated with researchers by sundry identifier authorities—Elsevier and Thomson, national libraries, grants agencies, institutions. And the authorities asserting equivalence between the identifiers will be national hubs (the UN doesn’t yet have the requisite infrastructure). The assertions themselves can be simple RDF statements of equivalence: katherine.mansfield@hogwarths.edu.au owl:sameAs kbeauchamp@unseen.ac.uk .

So the existing identifiers for authors are left alone, there is no unrealistic proposal to substitute them all with a Single Author Identifier. A layer is imposed over these identifiers, to deduplicate them. And that layer is decentralised, to the national level; because that is rather more feasible than a global solution.

A crucial insight is, these national hubs are still accountable to the researchers, unlike the authority file approach. And they will allow researchers to dissociate online identities, if that’s what they want. So if Kath Mansfield does not want the publications of Kate Jackson associated with her, she can get her national hub to assert instead katherine.mansfield@hogwarths.edu.au owl:differentFrom kbeauchamp@unseen.ac.uk. She can do that if the internet sleuthing associating the two identities is wrong. She can also do it, if it turns out to be right: the researcher is still empowered to control the representation of their own online identity.

To some extent. The national hubs are authorities, in the plural, and there may be another national hub insisting they are the same person after all. And that brings us back to consensus-driven wikiality, as we alluded to in the preceding post. There are authorities to assert two identities are the same, and those authorities are necessary to the scholarly process. But the identities of authors are subject to review and revision—just like the research they publish.

Even if *they* know who they are.

The business of a library is to establish authoritative identities for the works they make available. That is why libraries put together authority files, as unambiguous names for authors: those are the names books are indexed under, and searched under in library catalogues. There are several advantages of having an unambiguous identity for an author are obvious. A researcher who wants credit for their work—or the department whose funding depends on it—doesn’t want credit to go to another researcher with the same name. Anyone collecting royalties on their published work will want their identity to be unambiguous as well—though not all fields of research make it as worthwhile to chase after residuals.

Library users also appreciate disambiguation: if I am looking for works by or about the contemporary German novelist Richard Wagner (1952- ), I’d like to avoid the deluge of works by or about the slightly more famous German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). And a library catalogue is being helpful when it includes the dates of birth to differentiate between the two Richard Wagners—just as Wikipedia is, when it refers to Richard_Wagner_(novelist).

Making those kinds of distinctions depends on having good enough metadata on the authors. If you’ve publishing a dead-tree book in the past few decades, your national library has been in cahoots with your publisher to make sure they have that metadata. *I* don’t remember giving the Library of Congress my year of birth, but it avoids a car dealer in Florida getting credit for any books I’ve written. (See Libraries Australia.)
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This is my first ever attempt at writing a blog so please forgive me for going in all directions while expressing myself. This is quite daunting to think that I have something to say that this mesmerizing virtual world would be interested in reading.  However, I have no choice but to write this. There is no way I can say “NO” to my dear colleague Nick Nicholas who has so kindly asked me share my IMS-LIA Award experience with those who wish to participate in this year.  So I will attempt to write a few things about this experience in my own way. So here it goes….

IMS packaging and metadata standards have been part of  The Le@rning Federation (TLF) since the inception of this initiative in 2001. I have been involved with IMS work in some form or the other since I joined TLF in 2006.  One of the biggest challenges TLF faced at that time was how the wonderful digital materials it produced can be accessed by preschool teachers who had no access to a state-wide system.  My manager Nick Weideman and other managers at TLF had conceptualized a portal to resolve this delivery challenge when I was brought in to manage the development of this portal. This is where this journey began……
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