Authority Control for INVENIO

This is the final report for a Bachelor project at the École d'Ingénieurs et d'Architectes (EIA-FR), in collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva. The official starting date for this project was June 30th 2011. All of the work described in this document was done at CERN during an internship in the IT-UDS-CDS team. The goal of the project was to add authority contro1 to INVENIO. Authority control provides a library management software with two main functions. 1. It allows the disambiguation between similar or identical terms, such as author names referring to different people. 2. It allows for the collocation of seemingly distinct information that logically belongs together, e.g. alternate names for an author or institution. In recent years, INVENIO users have seen the need to control standardized ways of managing the names of authors and institutions, journals and subjects. “Authority records” keep track of the standard way (e.g. “Curie, Marie”) as well as alternative ways of writing a name (e.g. “Skłodowska Curie, Marie” or “Skłodowska, Marya”) and also help disambiguate between multiple authors/institutions etc with the same name. These records can be used by librarians as a reference for those fields in “bibliographic records” that require such a standardization. INVENIO is a free, open-source software for running digital libraries or document repositories on the web. It was originally developed at CERN to run the CERN document server, where it currently manages over 1'000'000 bibliographic records in high-energy physics since 2002, covering articles, books, journals, photos, videos, and more. Currently, INVENIO is being co-developed by an international collaboration comprising institutes such as CERN, DESY, EPFL, FNAL, SLAC and is being used by about thirty scientific institutions worldwide. As underlying bibliographic format, it uses the so called MARC 21 standard which is still the main international standard for large-scale digital library management systems.