Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)

The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is an international service designed to provide convenient access to the world's major name authority files. VIAF began as a joint project with the Library of Congress (LC), the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek  DNB), the Biblioth?que nationale de France (BNF) and OCLC. It has, over the past decade, become a cooperative effort involving an expanding number of other national libraries and other agencies. At the beginning of 2012, contributors include 20 agencies from 16 countries.  VIAF helps to make library authority files less expensive to maintain and more generally useful to the library domain and beyond. To achieve this, VIAF matches and links the authority files of national libraries and groups all authority records for a given entity into a merged ?super? authority record that brings together the different names for that entity. By linking disparate names for the same person or organization, VIAF provides a convenient means for a wider community of libraries and other agencies to repurpose bibliographic data produced by libraries serving different language communities.  http://viaf.org/