The Renouvaud network includes 139 academic, research, school and public libraries in Vaud, Switzerland. In 2019, it made the decision to replace its local authorities file with IdRef. Initially the reference authority service for academic and research libraries in France, IdRef is now used by libraries in Western Switzerland and Belgium as well. By joining IdRef, the Vaud libraries hope to harmonize their practices with other francophone libraries and to take advantage of a rich, international authorities file.
To simplify this transition, Renouvaud mandated Datuman to develop Ouali, a tool to help align local authorities with corresponding IdRef records. Ouali uses powerful algorithms to automate this process as much as possible and offers a convenient web-based interface to allow library staff to manually align records when a corresponding entry could not be automatically determined.
My contribution to this project consisted in the following tasks:
- Quality assurance of the Ouali tool, both in terms of user experience of the interface and the pertinence of automated alignements
- Qualitative and quantitative analysis of automated alignements
- Coordination with project partners (RERO+ and ABES)
- Writing end-user documentation for Ouali
- Producing short training videos
- Estimating the manual alignment workload
- Participation in manual alignment of authority records
- Participation in the Renouvaud IdRef working group
Collaboration
My work was done in collaboration with Datuman Sàrl, who developed the Ouali alignement tool.
