Register Now for the VIAF API Workshop on July 17
Fifth webinar in our API Workshop series
We’re happy to announce the VIAF API Workshop on Thursday, July 17 at 1pm ET. Join us as Ralph LeVan, Senior Research Scientist at OCLC, takes us on a tour of the VIAF API. If you’ve ever wondered the behind-the-scenes data work to distinguish pseudonyms, pen names or alternate author names—and how to add that knowledge to your library user experience—this session is for you.
What’s the VIAF API?
The VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) API is designed to make library authority files less expensive to maintain and more generally useful by linking national and regional-level authority records from the world’s major name authority files. To quote Ralph, “VIAF records are LCNAF on steroids. Anything you’d do with LCNAF you can do with VIAF. In addition, VIAF records point at other records for the same person, including ISNI, Wikipedia, and WorldCat Identities. All the links those records have are key to participating in the Linked Data world.”
Bobbi Fox and Joe Atzberger will also join us to talk about their Developer House project, which takes advantage of VIAF’s autosuggest endpoint in their handy jQuery VIAF Autocomplete widget. They'll include a code walkthrough of the widget, which accesses the API by sending a partial word as the user types and displaying matching valid terms to assist the user with their search.
We’ll help newbies get up to speed and encourage experts to share their experiences in this one hour online Workshop that covers everything from an overview of the data to use cases and a code walkthrough of a real application. Be sure to bring your questions and comments – we’ll include plenty of time for discussion.