Authoritative content to build trust in an age of information overload: The National Library Board of Singapore's experience

Abstract

The National Library Board of Singapore (NLB) has created thousands of authorised local names over the past 10 years for indexing of its resources. These names of entities comprise people, organisations and places and include their variant forms such as aliases and previous or successive forms. The names also contain further information about the entity, such as the achievements of a person, latitude and longitude of a place or the founding year of an organisation. NLB ensures trustworthiness of the data through authoritative research and by cross-checking content gleaned from crowdsourced knowledge bases such as Wikipedia. Data authenticity and transparency are maintained through policy guidelines governing acceptable sources of data and provenance of the data sourced. These include data from Singapore’s cultural institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) which are aggregated to enable seamless searching on NLB’s single-search platform, OneSearch.

These names are published in Singapore’s four official languages on international registries such as the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). We also intend to open up these names to other Singapore government agencies through the NLB Name Authorities platform. In making the name authority records available locally and overseas, indexing of content resources can be improved through the consistency of names used and the context provided with the information in each name record. As a knowledge base of local entities, the information is used as a data dictionary in NLB’s named-entity recognition that supports automatic indexing and is displayed in a knowledge panel on OneSearch when people search for these entities.

In this paper, we will share our experience in building NLB’s knowledge organisation system’s (KOS) knowledge base of Singaporean and Southeast Asian names to meet the paradoxical challenge of facilitating timely, relevant and trustworthy information in an increasingly amorphous digital world.