Controle de autoridade para entidades pessoas em repositórios institucionais que usam o DSPACE

Abstract

The increase in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) yields to a changing in the structure of scientific communication and enhances initiatives for accessing and sharing information. For instance, one can cite the Open Access Movement (OA), a result of Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), which institutionalized two ways to access information: golden way and green way. In this scenario, Institutional Repositories (IRs) emerge as an instrument for supporting Brazilian public universities to easy dissemination and access of scientific production, and librarians and managers assumed the responsibility to populate them. This data population, whether by self-population, mediated deposit or self-deposit, requires care regarding quality of metadata, as it structures and provides support to data description, allowing the records to be stored, organized, preserved and retrieved. Among the distinct types of metadata, the present study highlights the problems regarding authority control for the entity “person”, which refer to typing mistakes, duplicate records, different abbreviations, and name variations, which negatively impact the information retrieval. These problems are closely related to the ambiguity encompassing the determination of authors’ names. Considering that DSpace is the most adopted software by Brazilian IRs, this study proposes investigate how authority control occurs for personal entities in institutional repositories that use DSpace, highlighting the computational elements native or compatible (non-native) with the software, contributing to discussions about the disambiguation of proper names. The methodological procedures adopted a qualitative approach, with exploratory and descriptive objectives, having a basic nature, using as method the literature review. As an instrument of data collection, it was adopted the open questionnaire, applied to the repository managers through Google Forms, and for the reference management of the review it was used Zotero. The results showed that the activity of authority control for person entity is a complex process because it involves dealing with the problem of disambiguation of proper names (variants, abbreviations and name changes, misspellings, pseudonyms, homonyms, among others). Authority control today goes beyond the barriers of physical libraries, requiring cooperative and coordinated work involving the different players in the process, at local, regional, state, and international levels, as there is already robust enough technology to deal with heterogeneous metadata. As a contribution, it is believed that the clarifications about the native computational elements of DSpace can help the implementation and maintenance of IRs by their managers, and, in this way, facilitate the management of information about the researchers published there, contributing to the improvement of scientific communication.