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The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape. I love the comment an authority: “Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

Was reminded to blog about this after reading Lorcan’s post on the Names Project being run by JISC. From the blurb: _“The project is going to scope the requirements of UK institutional and subject repositories for a service that will reliably and uniquely identify names of individuals and institutions. It will then go on to develop a prototype service which will test the various processes involved. This will include determining the data format, setting up an appropriate database, mapping data from different sources, populating the database with records and testing the use of the data.

On the subject of author IDs (a subject Crossref is interested in and on which held a meeting earlier this year, as blogged about here), this post by Karen Coyle “Name authority control, aka name identification” may be worth a read. She starts off with this: “Libraries do something they call “name authority control”. For most people in IT, this would be called “assigning unique identifiers to names.” Identifying authors is considered one of the essential aspects of library cataloging, and it isn’t done in any other bibliographic environment, as far as I know.

February 5, 2007, Washington DC Crossref invited a number of people to attend an information gathering session on the topic of Author IDs. The purpose of the meeting was to determine: About whether there is an industry need for a central or federated contributor id registry; whether Crossref should have a role in creating such a registry; how to proceed in a way that builds upon existing systems and standards.