Interactive context-aware user-driven metadata correction in digital libraries

Personal name variants are a common problem in digital libraries, reducing the precision of searches and complicating browsing-based interaction. The book-centric approach of name authority control has not scaled to match the growth and diversity of digital repositories. In this paper, we present a novel system for user-driven integration of name variants when interacting with web-based information—in particular digital library—systems. We approach these issues via a client-side JavaScript browser extension that can reorganize web content and also integrate remote data sources. Designed to be agnostic towards the web sites it is applied to, we illustrate the developed proof-of-concept system through worked examples using three different digital libraries. We discuss the extensibility of the approach in the context of other user-driven information systems and the growth of the Semantic Web.