Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

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
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