Dr. Joanna Davies
Human Genetics, Box 1498
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
1 Gustave L. Levy Place
New York, NY 10029
U.S.A. 


Prof. Jim Pitman
Statistics Department
367 Evans Hall # 3860 
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860
U.S.A. 


Dear Prof. Pitman,

I am the CEO of the Open Library Society (OLS).  It is a very small
society.  Currently, we are supporting the work of Thomas Krichel to
build open-access metadata collections.

I am pleased to learn that OLS will be mentioned as a participant in
the Bibliographic Knowledge Network (BKN) proposal.  The two flagship
projects of the OLS, ARIW (http://ariw.org) and AuthorClaim
(http://authorclaim.org), are ready for the business.

ARIW is a catalog of universities and research institutions. The
catalog which aims at simplicity and ease of reuse of the data
collected. The main purpose, at this time, of ARIW, is to serve as an
input to AuthorClaim. ARIW can now provide you with a set of 7,000
institution descriptions.  Thomas has informed me that there may be up
to 20,000 when the project commences.  These data can be used to
aggregate institution descriptions to authoritative records.

AuthorClaim is a basic facility to associate author names with
document data by manual claiming of authors rather then by building
profiles in an automated way. AuthorClaim is built on ARIW and a set
of minimal document metadata from freely available sources. The
bibliographic input data is simple.

AuthorClaim will collect bibliographic data from BKN nodes for
integration into its portal.  This can be searched by authors to find
the works that they have written.  I understand that lists of works
will not be used by AuthorClaim itself but will simply be exported
back to the nodes.  Currently, AuthorClaim has about 17 Million
document records, but more will be added.  Thomas is working on
improving the interface to allow individuals with common names to
identify their documents efficiently.

I wish you good luck with the application.  I am considering
accompanying Thomas on his trip to San Francisco later this year, so
perhaps I will meet you then.

Sincerely,

Dr. Joanna Davies