I have been looking forward to mentioning Worldcat Identities. Thom describes the background here. This is very nice work by Thom and his colleagues.
This initiative mines Worldcat for individual identities and creates a page for each. There are a lot of nice features on each page. Here are some of the names I have mentioned in this blog recently:
David Weinberger
Tim O’Reilly
Germaine Greer
George Bernard Shaw
Kylie Minogue
John Kelly
A project like this shows how we can use bibliographic data in more interesting ways. Of course, because the data is being exercised it also shows up inconsistencies. And this in turn suggests systematic ways in which some of those may be tackled. Directions from here are interesting. How well can you match data from other sources? How best to gather and share augmentation and comment by the ‘identities’ themselves, or by others? This last point, of course, is a general question for libraries and for OCLC.
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