VIAF, Virtual International Authority File

Title from caption (viewed Apr. 26, 2010)

"A joint project with the Library of Congress, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in cooperation with an expanding number of other national libraries and other agencies, VIAF explores virtually combining the name authority files of participating institutions into a single name authority service. The project's goal is to lower the cost and increase the utility of library authority files by matching and linking the authority fiels of national libraries, and then making that information available on the Web. As of the winter of 2011 there are 21 authority files of personal, corporate, and conference names from 18 organizations participating in VIAF. Participating institutions are: National Library of Australia, National Library of the Czech Republic, Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt,) Bibliothéque nationale de France, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Getty Research Institute, National Library of Israel, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (Italy), Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Biblioteca Nacional de España, National Library of Sweden, Swiss National Library, Library of Congress/NACO, Vatican Library, NUKAT Center (Poland), Library and Archives Canada, National Széchényi Library (Hungary), RERO (Switzerland), Russian State Library, Flemish Public Libraries."