Friends,

I received this heartwarming message from a cataloger this morning, who writes:

“So, I had an Arabic name to enter into a record as part of a note, and I wasn’t confident about the diacritics.  So, I look in the authority file to temporarily download it, copy the form of the name, and then move on.  Couldn’t find the name in OCLC.  Look in Wikipedia under his common name – bingo.  Even better, Wikipedia has a link to VIAF, double bingo!  With the authorized form from VIAF, I could readily find the record in OCLC (I was tempted to copy the name form directly from VIAF, but didn’t want to push my luck.)  The miracles of an interconnected bibliographic dataverse!”

I asked if I could share with the Wikipedia community, and he added:

“By all means!  The name in question was Aziz Ali al-Misri.  The corresponding Wikipedia article is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Aziz_'Ali_al-Misri

Thank you for your efforts!  It made my work in my catalog possible!!”

The Wikipedia link was added by the VIAFbot, written by Max Klein, Andrew Gray and others.

Huzzah! Let’s hear it for connections!

Merrilee

Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research
777 Mariners Island Blvd Suite 550
San Mateo, CA 94404 USA
+1-650-287-2136

Merrilee blogs at hangingtogether.org
Follow me on Twitter @merrileeiam