Persistent Identifiers for People in the Past
Thursday May 23, 2024
From 1:00pm to 1:15pm
Document
PIDs or Persistent Identifiers, unique alphanumeric codes associated with specific entities, are a useful tool for providing authoritative, disambiguated, and persistently available information within and across resources. Academics have adopted ORCIDs to distinguish between the dozens of Richard Smiths publishing in a wide range of academic fields. We face similar challenges when studying the past, with individuals sharing the same name, such as the many James Armstrongs in nineteenth-century Canada.
Until now, there has been no concerted effort in Canada to create PIDs for individuals found in our digital archives. In partnership with Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, researchers at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Alberta and Guelph are working on a pilot project to gather and, where necessary, mint PIDs for individuals who lived in the past. The goal is to provide a set of PIDs with some identifying properties (such as names, birth and death dates, and occupations).
As a source for individuals likely to turn up in Canadian archives, we started with the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, which maintains a collection of nearly 9000 biographies, all published in French and English. We are also working with a dataset of about 2500 individuals who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. These two very different datasets allow us to learn the challenges of creating PIDs without erasing the uncertainty in the primary and secondary sources. The presentation will discuss our methods and demo the PIDs in action.
