The document discusses the Names Project which aims to create a name authority service to help disambiguate author names when depositing materials in institutional repositories. It notes that people depositing content need to add accurate metadata about creators and affiliations but these are entered inconsistently. The project will develop a prototype database of name records over 17 months to test solutions and work with repositories to integrate name disambiguation. It will seek input from an expert panel and aims to make it easier for creators to assign unambiguous identities when submitting materials.

1. Names Project Jackie Knowles Repositories Support Project (and Names Expert Panel member)

2. Why? Part of JISC Repositories & Preservation Programme People depositing copies of their papers, learning materials, slides in institutional and subject-based digital repositories Need to add metadata to the digital object for information retrieval

3. What? Creators: people involved in creating item Affiliations: names of institutions These may be entered in a variety of ways

4. For example: Collis, G P Paddy Collis G P Collis Gerard Paddy Collis Collis, Gerard P Gerard P Collis Collis, Gerard Paddy Collis, Paddy And these are all spelt correctly!

5. Retrieval Users may want to find all materials by a particular individual Difficult if the name has been entered in a variety of ways

6. Disambiguation Need to retrieve only those materials deposited by that particular individual With common names, there may be many matches – loss of precision Need to be able to uniquely identify individuals

7. Submission Need to make it easier for creators of metadata to assign an unambiguous identity to an individual Through an auto-complete function, for example Multiple authors and shifting affiliations means that it makes sense to do this at a national level

8. Project structure 17 month project Mimas (University of Manchester) partnering British Library Guided by an Expert Panel: Name authority experts Metadata and copyright experts Representatives of repository services JISC programme managers

9. Project plan Scoping phase for 6 months from July–Dec 2007 Investigating existing services and data structures Establishing requirements of repositories Identifying sources of data Determining ideal data structure Mapping source data to this structure Leading to specification for prototype service From January to November 2008, prototype development and testing

10. Current plans for Names prototype A database with sample name authority records for individuals and institutions will be created These records will represent particular issues that the service will have to deal with (e.g. linking different versions of the same name, individuals with multiple affiliations over time or different names, different individuals with the same name at the same institution) Records will be output in various name authority formats The prototype will accept searches and issue responses over HTTP

11. UKCORR Would a name authority service be of benefit to your repository? How do you currently deal with: authors with the same name? same author with different name forms? How easy would it be to interact with an external service for auto-completion of author names during submission? EPrints v3 offers this kind of functionality Do you have any comments on the usage scenarios that were circulated before this meeting? Or any additional uses for a name authority service?

12. Names Project website: http://names.mimas.ac.uk Project manager: [email_address]