Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors

[Michael Tuexen <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 17, 2013, at 8:19 PM, Melinda Shore <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 9/17/13 9:55 AM, Michael Tuexen wrote:
>> ... and that is my point. One level of indirection might be useful here.
>> I would prefer to update only one mapping and not go through a list
>> of RFCs and change the mapping for each document.
> 
> I really think that you all are completely over-engineering
> this.  But that's what I think.  What I *know* is that you're
Really?
Each RFC lists the addresses of the authors. My understanding is
that this information might be used to contact the authors in
case of questions, errata, ... At least this happened in the past.

For example
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3237.txt
has 7 authors. I know that at least 4 affiliations have changed
and at least you can't reach me anymore via the given e-mail
address or telephone number.

Best regards
Michael
> looking at this from the perspective of IETF contributors.
> Librarians have a problem, too, and the ORCID stuff primarily
> addresses that problem, not ours.
> 
> There's been a long history of difficulty in name usage on
> documents and that's confounded librarians, who for some
> reason (<- sarcasm) feel the need to be able to group works by the same
> author.  This has been dealt with through authority control
> mechanisms, where the cataloger tries to ascertain if
> a given "Scott Smith" is the same person as one of the
> many other Scott Smiths already in the catalog, and if not,
> creates a new authority record.  Discrimination is encoded
> in the authority records in the form of middle names/initials,
> dates of birth and death, etc.  Again, this is something the
> *cataloger* does, and it's actually rather difficult.  So,
> in a cataloging record the contents of the author field are
> normalized under authority control and the author name as it
> appears on the title page is carried in the body of the
> cataloging record, and not indexed.
> 
> There's a quite good discussion of this here:
> http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/09/name-authority-control-aka-name.html
> 
> What ORCID does is allow the author to help catalogers out
> by providing a unifying identifier.  It's not intended to
> be authenticative or provide identity information - it just
> helps group documents (which is why I think it belongs in a
> separate piece of metadata).  I don't think this is a huge
> deal and i don't think it requires community consensus.  I
> imagine most IETF authors, who for the most part are not
> academics, will bother with it, and that's just fine.
> 
> Melinda
> 
>