Landscape Report now available in Japanese

Japanese version of Landscape Report

Staff at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan have taken the trouble to translate the Names Project’s Landscape Report into Japanese for their Institutional Repositories Program. The Japanese version is available from the Program’s website.

Data Analysis report and mappings

One of the main deliverables for the first phase of the Names project was a report on the data requirements for the prototype that is now under development. This involved creating mappings from a variety of name authority standards to a data structure based on the entities defined by the Functional Requirements for Authority Data. The work was undertaken by Alan Danskin at the British Library and the report and the FRAD mappings are now available from the Names project’s documents page. The standards that were mapped were:

• International Standard for Archival Authority Records: Corporate and Family Names (ISAAR-CPF)
• MARC 21 Format for Authority Data
• Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP)
• UK PubMed Central’s grantee database (National Library of Medicine DTD)

Introducing the Names project

It’s been a bit slow in coming, but this is the blog associated with the JISC-funded Names project. The project started back in July 2007 and is charged with investigating the feasibility of developing a name authority service for use by the UK’s wide range of institutional and subject-based repositories. Names is a partnership between the British Library and Mimas, a data centre at the University of Manchester.

The work of the project has been roughly divided into two phases. Phase one (ending about now) has been all about research and requirements-gathering. The Landscape Report and the Requirements Report (both available from the Documents section of the project’s website) are the end-results of this phase of the project. These will help the project team to determine the functionality and form of the prototype that we’ll be constructing and testing in the next phase.