You can listen to Episode 1 of Season 5 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "Authority Issues" on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps, available via Buzzsprout.
Authority records, authority figures, authoritative scholarship… What does it really mean to have authority? Nothing good, according to Kandice. However, in working on a new project that relies on bibliographic data from the WPHP, she has had to confront her authority issues. (Meanwhile, Kate is still reeling from the discovery that ‘WorldCat’ is short for ‘World Catalogue’ and has nothing to do with felines.)
On this podcast, we have spent a lot—a lot—of time talking about our sources, and especially the libraries and digitization initiatives that enable us to verify the majority of our title records. In the first episode of Season 5 (!!!), Kate and Kandice once again dig into the different kinds of authority records that they use (and don't use) to create and populate WPHP records—from VIAF to the ESTC to WorldCat—as well as whether WPHP records count as authority records. Authority records can help identify entities and disambiguate people and editions from each other. But just as having authority doesn't mean you're always right, 'data' doesn't necessarily mean 'fact', and authority records can cause problems when they are built on faulty or limited data. From Sinful Sally to Frances Crewe, this episode explores the mistakes Kate and Kandice have made and the mistakes they have replicated from other resources to ask: what might it mean to call the WPHP an authority?
Credits
Produced by: Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy
Music by: Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com
Thanks to Lawrence Evalyn and Jack Orchard for submitting the corrections that inspired this episode.
The WPHP Monthly Mercury Episodes Referenced
Season 1, Episode 6: “Mind the (Data) Gaps”
Season 1, Episode 4: "A Bibliographical Education"
Season 2, Episode 2: “Collected, Catalogued, Counted”
Season 2, Episode 6: "The Ecology of Databases"
WPHP Records Referenced
Robinson, Mary (person)
Robinson, Maria Elizabeth (person)
Mary Robinson [Leeds] (firm)
Robinson, Mary [Leeds] (person)
Ann Sancho (firm)
Sancho, Ann (person)
William Sancho (firm)
Sancho, Ignatius (person)
Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (title)
Crewe, Frances Anne (person)
Philips, Frances Crewe (person)
Pope, Alexander (person)
Pride and Prejudice (First edn, 1813) (title)
Pride and Prejudice (Second edn, 1813) (title)
More, Hannah (person)
Scott, Walter (person)
Irving, Washington (person)
Works Cited
Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL Thesaurus). https://www.cerl.org/
Leuner, Kirstyn. “Restoring Authority for Women Writers: Name Authority Records as Digital Recovery Scholarship.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 1, 2021, pp. 13–26. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/hlq.2021.0002.
Ozment, Kate. “Digital Bibliography in the Age of Linked Data.” Journal of Early Modern Studies. Forthcoming.
“Pope, Maria Ann, 1775–1803.” Virtual International Authority File. https://viaf.org/viaf/315677298/#Pope,_Maria_Ann_1775-1803_actress
Print and Probability: ESTC Search. https://estc.printprobability.org/
“Robinson, Mary, 1944-.” Virtual International Authority File. https://viaf.org/viaf/47073247/#Robinson,_Mary,_1944-....
Virtual International Authority File. https://viaf.org/
WorldCat. https://search.worldcat.org/