Unsolved:Poor Richard's Almanack

Short description: Almanac published by Benjamin Franklin

1739 Edition of Poor Richard's Almanack

Poor Richard's Almanack (sometimes Almanac) was a yearly almanac published by Benjamin Franklin, who adopted the pseudonym of "Poor Richard" or "Richard Saunders" for this purpose. The publication appeared continually from 1732 to 1758. It sold exceptionally well for a pamphlet published in the Thirteen Colonies; print runs reached 10,000 per year.

Franklin, the American inventor, statesman, and accomplished publisher and printer, achieved success with Poor Richard's Almanack. Almanacks were very popular books in colonial America, offering a mixture of seasonal weather forecasts, practical household hints, puzzles, and other amusements. Poor Richard's Almanack was also popular for its extensive use of wordplay, and some of the witty phrases coined in the work survive in the contemporary American vernacular.

History

A nineteenth-century print based on Poor Richard's Almanack, showing the author surrounded by twenty-four illustrations of many of his best-known sayings

On December 28, 1732, Benjamin Franklin announced in The Pennsylvania Gazette that he had just printed and published the first edition of The Poor Richard, by Richard Saunders, Philomath. Franklin published the first Poor Richard's Almanack on December 28, 1732, and continued to publish new editions for 25 years, bringing him much economic success and popularity. The almanack sold as many as 10,000 copies a year. In 1735, upon the death of Franklin's brother, James, Franklin sent 500 copies of Poor Richard's to his widow for free, so that she could make money selling them.

Contents

The Almanack contained the calendar, weather, poems, sayings and astronomical and astrological information that a typical almanac of the period would contain. Franklin also included the occasional mathematical exercise, and the Almanack from 1750 features an early example of demographics. It is chiefly remembered, however, for being a repository of Franklin's aphorisms and proverbs, many of which live on in American English. These maxims typically counsel thrift and courtesy, with a dash of cynicism.

In the spaces that occurred between noted calendar days, Franklin included proverbial sentences about industry and frugality. Several of these sayings were borrowed from an earlier writer, Lord Halifax, many of whose aphorisms sprang from, "... [a] basic skepticism directed against the motives of men, manners, and the age." In 1757, Franklin made a selection of these and prefixed them to the almanac as the address of an old man to the people attending an auction. This was later published as The Way to Wealth, and was popular in both America and England.

Poor Richard

Franklin borrowed the name "Richard Saunders" from the seventeenth-century author of Rider's British Merlin, a popular London almanac which continued to be published throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin created the Poor Richard persona based in part on Jonathan Swift's pseudonymous character, "Isaac Bickerstaff". In a series of three letters in 1708 and 1709, known as the Bickerstaff papers, "Bickerstaff" predicted the imminent death of astrologer and almanac maker John Partridge. Franklin's Poor Richard, like Bickerstaff, claimed to be a philomath and astrologer and, like Bickerstaff, predicted the deaths of actual astrologers who wrote traditional almanacs. In the early editions of Poor Richard's Almanack, predicting and falsely reporting the deaths of these astrologers—much to their dismay—was something of a running joke. However, Franklin's endearing character of "Poor" Richard Saunders, along with his wife Bridget, was ultimately used to frame (if comically) what was intended as a serious resource that people would buy year after year. To that end, the satirical edge of Swift's character is largely absent in Poor Richard. Richard was presented as distinct from Franklin himself, occasionally referring to the latter as his printer.

In later editions, the original Richard Saunders character gradually disappeared, replaced by a Poor Richard, who largely stood in for Franklin and his own practical scientific and business perspectives. By 1758, the original character was even more distant from the practical advice and proverbs of the almanac, which Franklin presented as coming from "Father Abraham," who in turn got his sayings from Poor Richard.

Serialization

One of the appeals of the Almanack was that it contained various "news stories" in serial format, so that readers would purchase it year after year to find out what happened to the protagonists. One of the earliest of these was the "prediction" that the author's "good Friend and Fellow-Student, Mr. Titan Leeds" would die on October 17 of that year, followed by the rebuttal of Mr. Leeds himself that he would die, not on the 17th, but on October 26. Appealing to his readers, Franklin urged them to purchase the next year or two or three or four editions to show their support for his prediction. The following year, Franklin expressed his regret that he was too ill to learn whether he or Leeds was correct. Nevertheless, the ruse had its desired effect: people purchased the Almanack to find out who was correct. (Later editions of the Almanack would claim that Leeds had died and that the person claiming to be Leeds was an impostor; Leeds, in fact, died in 1738, which prompted Franklin to applaud the supposed impostor for ending his ruse.)

Criticism

For some writers the content of the Almanack became inextricably linked with Franklin's character—and not always to favorable effect. Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville caricatured the Almanack—and Franklin by extension—in their writings, while James Russell Lowell, reflecting on the public unveiling in Boston of a statue to honor Franklin, wrote:

... we shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston, and invented being struck with lightning and printing and the Franklin medal, and that he had to move to Philadelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance, and that he revenged himself on his native town by saddling it with the Franklin stove, and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved is a penny lost, or something of the kind.

The Almanack was also a reflection of the social norms and social mores of his times, rather than a philosophical document setting a path for new-freedoms, as the works of Franklin's contemporaries, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were. Historian Howard Zinn offers, as an example, the adage "Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely" as indication of Franklin's belief in the legitimacy of controlling the sexual lives of servants for the economic benefit of their masters.

At least one modern biographer has published the claim that Franklin "stole", not borrowed, the name of Richard Saunders from the deceased astrologer-doctor. Franklin also "borrowed—apparently without asking—and adapted the title of an almanac his brother James Franklin was publishing at Newport: Poor Robin's Almanack (itself appropriated from a seventeenth-century almanac published under the same title in London)".

Cultural impact

Louis XVI of France gave a ship to John Paul Jones who renamed it after the Almanack's author—Bonhomme Richard, or "Goodman (that is, a polite title of address for a commoner who is not a member of the gentry) Richard" (the first of several US warships so named). The Almanack was translated into Italian, along with the Pennsylvania State Constitution (which Franklin helped draft) at the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic. It was also twice translated into French, reprinted in Great Britain in broadside for ease of posting, and was distributed by members of the clergy to poor parishioners. It was the first work of English literature to be translated into Slovene, translated in 1812 by Janez Nepomuk Primic (1785–1823).

The Almanack also had a strong cultural and economic impact in the years following publication. In Pennsylvania, changes in monetary policy in regard to foreign expenses were evident for years after the issuing of the Almanack. Later writers such as Noah Webster were inspired by the almanac, and it went on to influence other publications of this type such as the Old Farmer's Almanac.

Sociologist Max Weber considered Poor Richard's Almanack and Franklin to reflect the "spirit of capitalism" in a form of "classical" purity." This is why he filled the pages of Chapter 2 of his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with illustrative quotations from Franklin's almanacks.

Numerous farmer's almanacs trace their format and tradition to Poor Richard's Almanack; the Old Farmer's Almanac, for instance, has included a picture of Franklin on its cover since 1851.

In 1958, the United States mobilized its naval forces in response to an attack on Vice President Richard Nixon in Caracas, Venezuela. The operation was code-named "Poor Richard".

See also

• The Papers of Benjamin Franklin

Bibliography

• Arch, Stephen Carl (July 1995). "Writing a Federalist self: Alexander Graydon's memoirs of a life". William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd Series (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture) 52 (3): 415–432. doi:10.2307/2947293. 
• Bellis, Mary. "Benjamin Franklin and his Times". http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventorsalphabet/a/Ben_Franklin_3.htm. 
• "Franklin: Poor Richard's Almanack". Bucknell University. 2004. http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/History/Carnegie/franklin/poorrichard.html. 
• Dauer, Manning J. (August 1976). "The impact of the American independence and the American Constitution: 1776–1848; with a brief epilogue". The Journal of Politics (Cambridge University Press) 38 (3): 37–55. doi:10.2307/2129573. 
• Goodrich, Charles A., Rev. (1829). Lives of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence. W. Reed & co.. https://archive.org/details/livessignerstod02goodgoog. 
• Hancock, David (Autumn 1998). "Commerce and conversation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic: The invention of Madeira wine". Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (2): 197–219. doi:10.1162/002219598551670. 
• "Benjamin Franklin Timeline". 1999–2007. http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/info/timeline.htm. 
• "Printer and publisher, Franklin gives a "Word to the Wise"". 2005. http://www.ipphila.com/iplinks/v4/is3/ar2.htm. 
• Kneeland, John; Wheeler, Henry Nathan (1891). Masterpieces of American Literature. United States: Houghton Mifflin & Co.. https://archive.org/details/masterpiecesame01wheegoog. 
• Laughter, Frank (1999–2003). "Golden nuggets from U.S. history: Benjamin Franklin and Poor Richard's Almanac". http://www.laughtergenealogy.com/bin/history/almanac.html. 
• Franklin, Benjamin (2005). Lemay, J.A. Leo. ed. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings. New York: Library of America. ISBN 1-883011-53-1. 
• Lena, Alberto (30 January 2003). "Poor Richard's Almanack". http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2617. 
• Miles, Richard D. (Summer 1957). "The American image of Benjamin Franklin". American Quarterly (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 9 (2): 117–143. doi:10.2307/2710628. 
• Miller, C. William (1961). "Franklin's "Poor Richard Almanacs": Their Printing and Publication". Studies in Bibliography (Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia) 14: 97–115. 
• Mulder, William (December 1979). "Seeing 'New Englandly': Planes of Perception in Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost". The New England Quarterly (The New England Quarterly, Inc.) 52 (4): 550–559. doi:10.2307/365757. 
• Newcomb, Robert (November 1957). "Benjamin Franklin and Montaigne". Modern Language Notes (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 72 (7): 489–491. doi:10.2307/3043511. 
• Newcomb, Robert (June 1955). "Poor Richard's debt to Lord Halifax". PMLA (Modern Language Association) 70 (3): 535–539. doi:10.2307/460054. 
• "Poor Richard's Almanac". ThinkQuest. 2003. http://library.thinkquest.org/22254/pra2.htm. 
• Pasles, Paul C. (June–July 2001). "The lost squares of Dr. Franklin: Ben Franklin's missing squares and the secret of the magic circle". The American Mathematical Monthly (Mathematical Association of America) 108 (6): 489–511. doi:10.2307/2695704. 
• Ross, John F. (September 1940). "The character of Poor Richard: Its source and alteration". PMLA (Modern Language Association) 55 (3): 785–794. doi:10.2307/458740. 
• Smith, Mark M. (February 1996). "Time, slavery and plantation capitalism in the ante-bellum American south". Past and Present 150: 142–168. doi:10.1093/past/150.1.142. 
• "English colonial era: 1700 to 1763". 1998. http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/revolution/rev-col.htm. 
• Wilson, Pip (2006). "A calendar history". http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/calendar_history.html. 
• Zinn, Howard (1980). A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 
• Isaacson, Walter (2004). Benjamin Franklin: an American life. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-6848-07614. https://archive.org/details/benjaminfranklin0000isaa. 

See also:

• Franklin, Benjamin (1976). Brooks, Van Wyck. ed. Poor Richard: The Almanacks for the years 1733-1758. New York: Paddington Press. ISBN 9780846701200. https://archive.org/details/poorrichardalman0000fran_s1a9/page/n5/mode/2up=. 

External links

• "High-Quality Scanned Images of several pages of Poor Richard's Almanack". 14 February 2006. https://www.flickr.com/photos/franklinremix/sets/72057594064843539/. 
• "Complete high-quality images for most of the almanacs". http://www.rarebookroom.org/.  (Click "find by author" and select "Franklin" for a complete list.)

Short description: Unique headings used for bibliographic information

For the Wikipedia information page, see Help:Authority control.

In information science, authority control is a process that organizes information, for example in library catalogs, by using a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or an identifier (generally persistent and alphanumeric) for each topic or concept. The word authority in authority control derives from the idea that the names of people, places, things, and concepts are authorized, i.e., they are established in one particular form. These one-of-a-kind headings or identifiers are applied consistently throughout catalogs which make use of the respective authority file, and are applied for other methods of organizing data such as linkages and cross references. Each controlled entry is described in an authority record in terms of its scope and usage, and this organization helps the library staff maintain the catalog and make it user-friendly for researchers.

Catalogers assign each subject—such as author, topic, series, or corporation—a particular unique identifier or heading term which is then used consistently, uniquely, and unambiguously for all references to that same subject, which removes variations from different spellings, transliterations, pen names, or aliases. The unique header can guide users to all relevant information including related or collocated subjects. Authority records can be combined into a database and called an authority file, and maintaining and updating these files as well as "logical linkages" to other files within them is the work of librarians and other information catalogers. Accordingly, authority control is an example of controlled vocabulary and of bibliographic control.

As time passes, information changes, prompting needs for reorganization. According to one view, authority control is not about creating a perfect seamless system but rather it is an ongoing effort to keep up with these changes and try to bring "structure and order" to the task of helping users find information.

Benefits of authority control

• Better researching. Authority control helps researchers understand a specific subject with less wasted effort. A well-designed digital catalog/database enables a researcher to query a few words of an entry to bring up the already established term or phrase, thus improving accuracy and saving time.
• Makes searching more predictable. It can be used in conjunction with keyword searching using "and" or "not" or "or" or other Boolean operators on a web browser. It increases chances that a given search will return relevant items.
• Consistency of records.
• Organization and structure of information.
• Efficiency for catalogers. The process of authority control is not only of great help to researchers searching for a particular subject to study, but it can help catalogers organize information as well. Catalogers can use authority records when trying to categorize new items, since they can see which records have already been cataloged and can therefore avoid unnecessary work.
• Maximizes library resources. Authority control helps ensure libraries have an accurate inventory of their materials, so that, for example, duplicate orders are not placed for an already owned resource.
• Fewer errors. It can help catch errors caused by typos or misspellings which can sometimes accumulate over time, sometimes known as quality drift. These errors can then be corrected by library staff or by automated clean-up software.

Examples

Diverse names describe the same subject

Princess Diana is described in one authority file as "Windsor, Diana, Princess of Wales" which is an official heading.

Sometimes within a catalog, there are diverse names or spellings for only one person or subject. This variation may cause researchers to overlook relevant information. Authority control is used by catalogers to collocate materials that logically belong together but that present themselves differently. Records are used to establish uniform titles that collocate all versions of a given work under one unique heading even when such versions are issued under different titles. With authority control, one unique preferred name represents all variations and will include different variations, spellings and misspellings, uppercase versus lowercase variants, differing dates, and so forth. For example, in Wikipedia, the first wife of Charles III is described by an article Diana, Princess of Wales as well as numerous other descriptors, e.g. Princess Diana, but both Princess Diana and Diana, Princess of Wales describe the same person so they all redirect to the same main article; in general, all authority records choose one title as the preferred one for consistency. In an online library catalog, various entries might look like the following:

1. Diana. (1)
2. Diana, Princess of Wales. (1)
3. Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961–1997. (13)
4. Diana, Princess of Wales 1961–1997. (1)
5. Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961–1997. (2)
6. DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES, 1961–1997. (1)

These terms describe the same person. Accordingly, authority control reduces these entries to one unique entry or officially authorized heading, sometimes termed an access point: Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961–1997.

Authority file	Heading / ID
Virtual International Authority File	VIAF ID: 107032638
Wikipedia article/category	Diana, Princess of Wales
Wikidata	Wikidata identifier: Q9685
Integrated Authority File (GND)	GND ID: 118525123
U.S. Library of Congress	Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961–1997
WorldCat Identities	Diana Princess of Wales 1961–1997
Biblioteca Nacional de España	Windsor, Diana, Princess of Wales
KANTO – National Agent Data (Finland)	Diana, Walesin prinsessa / KANTO ID: 000104109
Getty Union List of Artist Names	Diana, Princess of Wales English noble and patron, 1961–1997
National Library of the Netherlands	Diana, prinses van Wales, 1961–1997

Generally, there are different authority file headings and identifiers used by different libraries in different countries, possibly inviting confusion, but there are different approaches internationally to try to lessen the confusion. One international effort to prevent such confusion is the Virtual International Authority File which is a collaborative attempt to provide a single heading for a particular subject. It is a way to standardize information from different authority files around the world such as the Integrated Authority File (GND) maintained and used cooperatively by many libraries in German-speaking countries and the United States Library of Congress. The idea is to create a single worldwide virtual authority file. For example, the ID for Princess Diana in the GND is 118525123 (preferred name: Diana < Wales, Prinzessin>) while the United States Library of Congress uses the term Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961–1997; other authority files have other choices. The Virtual International Authority File choice for all of these variations is VIAF ID: 107032638 — that is, a common number representing all of these variations.

The English Wikipedia prefers the term "Diana, Princess of Wales", but at the bottom of the article about her, there are links to various international cataloging efforts for reference purposes.

Same name describes two different subjects

Sometimes two different authors have been published under the same name. This can happen if there is a title which is identical to another title or to a collective uniform title. This, too, can cause confusion. Different authors can be distinguished correctly from each other by, for example, adding a middle initial to one of the names; in addition, other information can be added to one entry to clarify the subject, such as birth year, death year, range of active years such as 1918–1965 when the person flourished, or a brief descriptive epithet. When catalogers come across different subjects with similar or identical headings, they can disambiguate them using authority control.

Authority records and files

A customary way of enforcing authority control in a bibliographic catalog is to set up a separate index of authority records, which relates to and governs the headings used in the main catalog. This separate index is often referred to as an "authority file". It contains an indexable record of all decisions made by catalogers in a given library (or—as is increasingly the case—cataloging consortium), which catalogers consult when making, or revising, decisions about headings. As a result, the records contain documentation about sources used to establish a particular preferred heading, and may contain information discovered while researching the heading which may be useful.

While authority files provide information about a particular subject, their primary function is not to provide information but to organize it. They contain enough information to establish that a given author or title is unique, but that is all; irrelevant but interesting information is generally excluded. Although practices vary internationally, authority records in the English-speaking world generally contain the following information:

• Headings show the preferred title chosen as the official and authorized version. It is important that the heading be unique; if there is a conflict with an identical heading, then one of the two will have to be chosen:

  Since the headings function as access points, making sure that they are distinct and not in conflict with existing entries is important. For example, the English novelist William Collins (1824–89), whose works include the Moonstone and The Woman in White is better known as Wilkie Collins. Cataloguers [sic] have to decide which name the public would most likely look under, and whether to use a see also reference to link alternative forms of an individual's name.

  — Mason, M.K., Purpose of authority work and files

• Cross references are other forms of the name or title that might appear in the catalog and include:
  1. see references are forms of the name or title that describe the subject but which have been passed over or deprecated in favor of the authorized heading form
  2. see also references point to other forms of the name or title that are also authorized. These see also references generally point to earlier or later forms of a name or title.
• Statement(s) of justification is a brief account made by the cataloger about particular information sources used to determine both authorized and deprecated forms. Sometimes this means citing the title and publication date of the source, the location of the name or title on that source, and the form in which it appears on that source.

For example, the Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, who lived from 1911 to 1966, wrote under many pen names such as Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen. Catalogers at the United States Library of Congress chose one form—"O'Brien, Flann, 1911–1966"—as the official heading. The example contains all three elements of a valid authority record: the first heading O'Brien, Flann, 1911–1966 is the form of the name that the Library of Congress chose as authoritative. In theory, every record in the catalog that represents a work by this author should have this form of the name as its author heading. What follows immediately below the heading beginning with Na Gopaleen, Myles, 1911–1966 are the see references. These forms of the author's name will appear in the catalog, but only as transcriptions and not as headings. If a user queries the catalog under one of these variant forms of the author's name, he or she would receive the response: "See O'Brien, Flann, 1911–1966." There is an additional spelling variant of the Gopaleen name: "Na gCopaleen, Myles, 1911–1966" has an extra C inserted because the author also employed the non-anglicized Irish spelling of his pen-name, in which the capitalized C shows the correct root word while the preceding g indicates its pronunciation in context. So if a library user comes across this spelling variant, he or she will be led to the same author regardless. See also references, which point from one authorized heading to another authorized heading, are exceedingly rare for personal name authority records, although they often appear in name authority records for corporate bodies. The final four entries in this record beginning with His At Swim-Two-Birds ... 1939. constitute the justification for this particular form of the name: it appeared in this form on the 1939 edition of the author's novel At Swim-Two-Birds, whereas the author's other noms de plume appeared on later publications.

Card catalog records such as this one used to be physical cards contained in long rectangular drawers in a library; today, generally, this information is stored in online databases.

Authority control with "Kesey, Ken" as the chosen heading.

Access control

The act of choosing a single authorized heading to represent all forms of a name is quite often a difficult and complex task, considering that any given individual may have legally changed their name or used a variety of legal names in the course of their lifetime, as well as a variety of nicknames, pen names, stage names or other alternative names. It may be particularly difficult to choose a single authorized heading for individuals whose various names have controversial political or social connotations, when the choice of authorized heading may be seen as endorsement of the associated political or social ideology.

An alternative to using authorized headings is the idea of access control, where various forms of a name are related without the endorsement of one particular form.

Cooperative cataloging

Before the advent of digital online public access catalogs and the Internet, individual cataloging departments within each library generally carried out creating and maintaining a library's authority files. Naturally, there was a considerable difference in the authority files of the different libraries. For the early part of library history, it was generally accepted that, as long as a library's catalog was internally consistent, the differences between catalogs in different libraries did not matter greatly.

As libraries became more attuned to the needs of researchers and began interacting more with other libraries, the value of standard cataloging practices came to be recognized. With the advent of automated database technologies, catalogers began to establish cooperative consortia, such as OCLC and RLIN in the United States, in which cataloging departments from libraries all over the world contributed their records to, and took their records from, a shared database. This development prompted the need for national standards for authority work.

In the United States, the primary organization for maintaining cataloging standards with respect to authority work operates under the aegis of the Library of Congress Program for Cooperative Cataloging. It is known as the Name Authority Cooperative Program, or NACO Authority.

Standards

There are various standards using different acronyms.

Standards for authority metadata

• MARC standards for authority records in machine-readable format.
• Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS), an XML schema for an authority element set that may be used to provide metadata about agents (people, organizations), events, and terms (topics, geographics, genres, etc.).
• Encoded Archival Context, an XML schema for authority records conforming to ISAAR.

Standards for object identification, controlled by an identification-authority

• Legal personality identification systems (person-IDs) and authorities:
  • serey (CPF) – International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families. Published by the International Council on Archives
  • ISNI – International Standard Name Identifier
    • ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID, a subset of the ISNI, to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors.
    • DAI – Digital Author Identification, another subset of ISNI.
  • GRID – Global Research Identifier Database
  • GND – Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei), authority file for personal names, corporate bodies and subject headings.
  • KANTO – National Agent Data (finaf), authority file for persons and corporate bodies.
  • LCCN – Library of Congress Control Number
  • NDL – National Diet Library
  • VIAF – Virtual International Authority File, an aggregation of authority files currently focused on personal and corporate names.
  • WorldCat/identities
• Bibliographic object identification systems and authorities:
  • DOI – Digital object identifier
  • urn:lex, for law-document identifiers, controlled by local law authorities.
  • ISBN – International Standard Book Number
  • ISSN – International Standard Serial Number
• Other identification systems (for generic named-entities) and authorities:
  • GeoNames
  • TGN – Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

Standards for identified-object metadata

• vCard
• Dublin Core

See also

• Persistent identifier
• Knowledge Organization Systems
• Library classification systems:
  • Dewey Decimal Classification
  • Library of Congress Classification
• Ontology (information science)
• Proprietary services
  • ResearcherID
• Registration authority
• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)