'Virtual International Authority' Library, Partners Form Online Name Authority Service

摘要

The Library of Congress has entered a cooperative agreement with OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. and Die Deutsche Bibliothek, the national library of Germany, to test the concept of a Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) on the Internet. The VIAF will provide open access on the Web to approximately 2 million records for personal names from Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB) and more than 3.8 million personal name records from the Library of Congress. In cases where both national libraries have a record for a personal name, the VIAF will link the two records so that users can view the information in both, using the search techniques they prefer. The VIAF project offers immediate benefits in making cataloging more efficient and catalog searching more precise. The VIAF also holds long-term promise as a basic building block of the "semantic Web"―a future version of the Web that will permit human-to-human, human-to-computer, and computer-to-computer communication.