February 14, 2011 – As social media plays an increasingly important role in professional and scholarly publishing, taxonomies can be increasingly useful in connecting people of similar expertise and interests with their peers. This can lead to greater opportunities for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community building. For publishers and scholarly societies, author networks are key to editorial planning, the peer review process, and a wealth of activities supporting the organization and its programs. Taxonomies can play an important role in improving the quality of this “people data,” by enabling name disambiguation and by tagging people’s names with their appropriate subjects.
Bert Carelli, vice president of business development for Access Innovations will wrap up a four-part webinar series co-hosted with the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), by discussing how taxonomies can help standardize authority file data so that effective networks can be built and used to enhance research efforts, provide educational resources, and better monetize valuable information assets.
“Publishers are often confounded by the problems of unambiguously identifying authors and managing author profile information. Editors need to quickly identify and contact potential reviewers with specific domain knowledge,” Carelli explains. He adds, “The many overlapping networks of contributing authors and ever-growing stores of bibliographic data increase the likelihood of two or more individuals having the same or similar names. Complicating the problem further, personal names often appear in multiple variations, reflecting cultural differences in naming conventions across globally dispersed research communities.”
Solving these types or problems will create new opportunities for collaboration among researchers, and greater discoverability for publishers, authors, and institutional repositories, Carelli explains.
Carelli is a veteran of the online information industry, having previously led content acquisition teams for Dow Jones/Factiva and Dialog. As head of business development and publisher partnerships for several Silicon Valley startups, he helped launch new text mining and search products for enterprises and consumers.
The webinar is scheduled Thursday, Feb. 17 from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Cost is free for ASIS&T members and $49 per session for others. Online registrations are being accepted.
