The following principles were developed by the PCC Identity Management Advisory Committee to guide the future policies and work concerning the creation, management, and use of alternative registries. The guiding principles will continue to be tested throughout the EMCO early adopter phase. IMAC will review these principles at the conclusion of the early adopter phase and welcomes feedback from policy maintainers, practitioners, and technologists.

Assessing Alternative Registries

Rather than providing PCC members with a hierarchy of preferred alternative registries, IMAC and the new PCC Cooperative Program for Entity Management will develop a set of criteria for assessing alternative registries and facilitate supportive communities for their implementation.

IMAC envisions a community resource center, modeled after the success of the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group, where users of alternative registries can set up communities where tips and potential pitfalls can be shared. The PCC program would compile and offer training, office hours, and Q&A sessions for these communities. 

Some criteria for assessing alternative registries for use include:

• Does the registry provide sufficient data to enable someone to know if the entity on file is the same or different from the one in hand?
• Is maintenance of data in the registry likely to take place, and does it look feasible?
  What are the purposes served by the registry, and how do they relate to the goals of users of library metadata?
• Is the registry compatible with PCC values concerning privacy?

Phased Implementation

IMAC and a new PCC Entity Management Cooperative will take a phased implementation approach for doing entity management in alternative registries. Prior to the Early Adopter Phase, IMAC will develop evaluation and feedback processes in order to track concerns and recommendations.

The community resource center described above will provide users with avenues to track concerns and recommendations. IMAC hopes to expand the scope of the PCC Wiki

 for this purpose. Stakeholder groups within the PCC will be explicitly invited to comment.

Required Data Properties

The new PCC Entity Management Cooperative will develop and maintain a minimum core set of data properties for PCC-created entities in alternative registries.

Looking into minimum requirements for entities in alternative registries, and resisting thinking about this question within a MARC-based framework, early adopters will create a core set of data requirements in a quick-reference data dictionary, adding to the dictionary as new registries are added by the community. 

Suggested requirements to serve as a starting point:

• Registries must assign unique identifiers to entities
• Registries must include at least one label for each entity
• Registries should provide support for alternate labels

Sensitivity to Modeling Differences

Differences in data models between LCNAF and alternative registries will be considered as rules and best practices are developed within PCC communities of practice.

During the early implementation phase, PCC participants will evaluate how their alternative registries might interact with existing PCC metadata using the LCNAF. Guidance is needed for communities in how to assert near-match, whole-part and other non-one-to-one relationships between the LCNAF and other registries. For example, corporate name changes require new LCNAF headings. The same is not necessarily true in Wikidata. Pseudonyms are sometimes treated as alternative labels, and sometimes treated as separate entities. ISNI has policies on pseudonyms and corporate body name changes. Communities of practice should consider alternative registries’ policies and data models and build guidelines for use accordingly. 

Outside of authorities for agents, data modeling and entity matching becomes much more complex. BIBFRAME Works, Hubs, and Opuses, LRM and RDA Works and Expressions, and other closely-related entities in registries such as Wikidata are being minted to represent very similar conceptual entities, but cannot be exact matches for one another due to significant differences in the RDF classes to which they belong. The cataloging community needs guidance on how to relate these entities to one another. This work cannot be done until the ontologies we are using are stabilized. For this reason, the initial implementation phase of the (id)entity management cooperative will cover agents (people, families, and corporate bodies) only.

Mindfulness of Practitioners' Time

Catalogers working in alternative registries should not be required by the PCC to create a corresponding entry in the LCNAF.

Entity management work in alternative registries, in addition to LCNAF, is neither practical nor, at times, always possible. EMCO would encourage use of data that is already present in the broader metadata ecosphere. National libraries around the globe produce high-quality entity records that could be referenced in bibliographic records, instead of replicating work in the LCNAF to then use in a bibliographic record. In this way, EMCO would function as a natural bridge to the global library community, where there are international cataloging and authority standards in play.

Catalogers who are creating authenticated records via the BIBCO and CONSER programs will continue to follow BIBCO and CONSER requirements.  A bib record marked as PCC with URIs in the access points should be sufficient. There is an educational role in PCC to make catalogers aware that the URIs are the equivalent of creating/pointing to LCNAF records. One workflow advantage of using a registry other than LCNAF could be the lower training hurdle of learning a different system compared with the high training investment needed to contribute to LCNAF.

Nonunique Naming

IMAC acknowledges that the community cannot make every entity label in alternative registries compatible with LCNAF conventions. The costs and benefits of flagging records that do not follow NACO heading constructions in order to reconcile them against the LCNAF should be carefully considered.

Once the PCC adopts a policy to accept multiple registries, the LCNAF should not be privileged over other registries. IMAC recommends that headings from alternative registries in PCC records require a URI in $0 or $1. Labels created by PCC members in alternative registries should follow the conventions of that registry. In the context of the LCNAF, bibliographic file maintenance was string-based. A best practice after PCC practice opens up to alternative registries would be to note the existence of equivalent entities in other registries through the addition of 024 fields in corresponding LCNAF records. It would be beneficial to periodically check alternative registries against the LCNAF in order to populate LCNAF entities with URIs for matching entities in other registries. This approach would benefit from input from the MARC Advisory Committee, and will have implications for the NACO Participants’ Manual and the DCM Z1.

PCC Required Contributions

Institute new policies on what constitutes a contribution for the purposes of PCC membership.

During early implementation, no quantity requirements will be set by the new program for (id)entity management. Building communities of practice is the main contribution participants in this phase of the program will make.

PCC authority contributions will need to be redefined with the introduction of alternative registries to the program’s entity management work. IMAC recommends that PoCo appoint a new group to develop and implement recommendations. This group would answer the following questions:

• What counts as a PCC contribution?
• How can the PCC lower the threshold for broader participation in its entity management work?
• Will PCC catalogers report separate statistics for each registry they work in?
• Can the burden of reporting statistics be lessened through automation or simplification?

This work will build on and impact the recommendations submitted by the Task Group on Required Contributions to the PCC.

Vendor Engagement

Toward the end of the early implementation phase, the new program on (id)entity management will engage with authority vendors on future services needed by libraries.

Recommendations will include a suggestion to OCLC to redesign the “Control Headings” functionality in OCLC Connexion client to take account of alternative registries. The current behavior of this functionality is to attempt to control qualified headings in 1XX/7XX and to strip $0 while retaining $1. While $0 data is stored behind the scenes, it can only be exported in WorldShare Record Manager or delivered via WorldShare Collection Manager. Enabling the export of bibliographic records from the Connexion client, in a way that both the $0 and $1 are retained, is preferred.

Other recommendations may include:

• Encouraging vendors to transition from text string flipping to minting identifiers. Recommendations would include specifications for such identifiers.
• Requesting better tools for metadata creation and management, such as API calls to multiple entity management registries.

The program on (id)entity management will collaborate with the Standing Committee on Applications on any recommendations they make to vendors.

Contact the PCC Identity Management Advisory Committee with questions.