Author profiles added to the eHRAF databases

HRAF is excited to announce a new feature in eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology. Author profiles have been added to the eHRAF databases.

What are author profiles?

The author profiles consist of biographical information about the more than eight thousand anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, sociologists, linguists, indigenous writers, museums, universities, and other individuals and institutions who produced the documents that make up eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology. Most of these contributors were authors, but some of them translated various documents into English for HRAF.

How can I view the profiles?

Author profiles are accessible from the publication information pages for documents. Simply click the author’s name in the byline for the document, and a sidebar will appear with the biographical information listed.

What information is included?

Biographical information available for these authors includes gender, nationality, date and place of birth, date and place of death, occupation, country of education, the schools they attended, and more.

Where did the information come from?

The biographical information was gathered from various national libraries around the world: the Library of Congress, the German National Library, the French National Library, the National Library and Archives of Québec, the Danish Bibliographic Centre, the National Library of Latvia, the National Library of Poland, and the National Library of Korea, as well as Wikidata, a resource of open data that is part of the Wikimedia Foundation.

This has been possible through the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), a joint project of several national libraries maintained by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). VIAF harvests bibliographic information about authors, works, and other subjects from national libraries into a central resource.

How was the information gathered?

Over the past two years, Ben Ostermeier, a member of the software engineering team at HRAF, has developed this resource by associating each HRAF author with a VIAF record. With his background in library science, Ben validated each author against a VIAF record to ensure they were describing the same individual. He then wrote a script to automatically gather the metadata for each author from VIAF and some of the national libraries it connects to.

How reliable are author profiles?

While Ben is confident that each author is associated with the correct VIAF record, we are not the creators of the information about authors and thus cannot speak to their veracity. We instead function as an entry point to information kept at national libraries and Wikidata, with eHRAF author profiles citing the source of each data point for an author.

If you see any errors, please both let us know via email at hraf-support@yale.edu and also inform the library or resource that originated the error. It may be possible to correct errors in the originating resource, but, with the exception of Wikidata, these corrections can take time and may not always be possible.

Are profiles available for all authors?

Unfortunately, not all HRAF authors are in VIAF’s database, meaning we do not have information available for every author, and some entries in VIAF have limited information available.

However, the majority of HRAF authors are verified with a VIAF record. Currently, of the 8,547 authors in eHRAF databases, 6,581 (77%) of them are verified with a VIAF record.

Can information be used to filter eHRAF search results?

Yes, eHRAF users can use biographical information to filter searches for paragraphs in eHRAF. For example, filtering a search to only provide ethnographic documents written by women. Currently, it is possible to filter on an author’s gender and their country of education, with more filters coming in the future.

Will there be updates to the information?

Yes, we will continue to improve our collection of author information, including adding information from more libraries connected to VIAF. And since VIAF itself and library records also continuously update, we will regularly update our records to reflect these updates. Each author profile includes a “date last updated” field.