ABES, a public agency that creates and manages information-based tools and services for the university and research communities within the framework of French national strategy, recently had the pleasure of welcoming a delegation from ORCID to Montpellier – Laure Haak, Executive Director, and Josh Brown, Regional Director for Europe. The agenda for this meeting was to learn more about each other by establishing our respective positions, to explore areas of convergence, and finally to agree some shared actions to mark the beginning of our future cooperation.
The morning presentations by ORCID on one hand and IdRef, which is a national database of authority records for French higher education and research libraries, on the other, fulfilled our goal of developing a mutual understanding and helped establish that the two projects are, indeed, complementary rather than redundant.
In the afternoon, a technical session focused on the potential for interoperability between IdRef, ORCID and beyond – for example, with ABES’ bibliographic databases: Sudoc, the union catalogue of France’s higher education libraries, theses.fr a portal for French theses, and Calames, an online catalogue of higher education archives and manuscripts; as well as more broadly with IdRef’s users such as Persée – a digital publication portal for scholarly journals in the humanities and HAL, the largest French open archive, etc.
It quickly became clear that, by working together, we will be able to:
– provide users with the ability to automatically fuel their ORCID account with rich, accurate data from our databases
– enable our databases to benefit from the increased awareness of and interest in ORCID in the French research community
As a result of the meeting, we have agreed to develop in the next few weeks a Memorandum Of Understanding between ABES and ORCID, based on the types of cooperation we discussed. This will not be limited just to ABES, but will also be opened up to other national actors who are interested in the challenge of individual identifiers in the field of research.
This post is also available in French on the ABES blog.