WikiQueer:Authority control

The Authority control template is used to display a special set of metadata that can and should be added to biographical articles where such identifiers exist. The identifiers displayed by the template link WikiQueer articles and the corresponding entries in catalogs of national libraries and other authority files all over the world.

The following authority files are supported at the moment: GND (German National Library), LCCN (Library of Congress), SELIBR (National Library of Sweden) and the Virtual International Authority File (Online Computer Library Center). The Virtual International Authority File combines authority records from around 20 national libraries and other authority files like the Getty Union List of Artist Names.

To add additional value for the reader, the identifiers are linked to the corresponding entries in the online databases of the Virtual International Authority File, the German National Library and the contents of the Libary of Congress' authority records hosted by the Online Computer Library Center. These links are expected to change when better tools become available that use these identifiers to present the readers with access to online catalogues and other sources of information about the article's subject.

Purpose
National libraries and other libraries, archives and collections use these authority records to link works to specific persons who either were involved in the creation of these works or are the subjects of these works. Such works can be books, comic books, music albums, all kinds of videos (movies, documentaries, TV series), paintings and so on.

By adding such data to WikiQueer articles, software developers from both the Wikimedia and library community will be able to create new tools to link and combine information from WikiQueer and databases and online catalogs that use these identifiers.

Position
As a metadata template, the Authority control template should be placed after the external links section and navigation templates, right before the Persondata template.

VIAF
The VIAF ID corresponding to the subject of the article can be found on http://viaf.org, which combines authority records from many organizations worldwide into single datasets. Enter the person's name in the search field and find the corresponding dataset in the search results. The VIAF ID can be found underneath the name list.

If the entries for a particular person in the various authority records haven't been merged into a single VIAF dataset yet, use the VIAF ID that contains the subject's LCCN. Sooner or later VIAF will merge them into one dataset and redirect to this from old IDs.

LCCN
The Library of Congress Control Number can be found on various websites. The easiest way is via http://viaf.org (see above). Other options are the websites of Library of Congress Identities and Worldcat Identities.

Note that the LCCN has to be formatted in a special way so it can be used in the template: it consists of a alphabetic prefix ("n", "nr", "no", etc..), the year (two digits, four digits since 2001) and a 6-digit serial number. These parts have to be separated by a "/" and leading zeros of the serial number have to be removed.



GND (former PND)
The GND can also be found via http://viaf.org. They are marked with "DNB" (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek). The GND entries in the VIAF datasets are linked to the entries in the online catalogue of the German National Library. On that site, the GND can either be found in the browser's adress bar as part of the website's adress or as the last part of a web adress in the field named "Link zu diesem Datensatz".

Note that only records where the name field is labeled "Person" are valid GND records that can be used in this template. If the name field is labeled "Name", this particular record is not individualized, which means that the record can contain publications of various authors of the same name.

SELIBR
The identifier used by the National Library of Sweden ca also be found via http://viaf.org. The VIAF datasets containing such identifiers link to the authority records at http://libris.kb.se. Copy the number in the last part of that web adress and paste it into the SELIBR parameter in the template.

SWD and GKD
As the template was imported from the German WikiQueer, it also supports identifiers from the German Schlagwortnormdatei (SWD) that contains keywords (similar to the Library of Congress Subject Headings) and the German Gemeinsame Körperschaftsdatei which contains organizations, companies, musical groups, event, etc. These identifiers are used in only few articles on the English WikiQueer at the moment.

Examples

 * Stephen King:
 * Albert Einstein:
 * Barack Obama: