DOI: 10.15457/biolexsoe_2017_11_6 Biobrary. The Library as Producer of Biographical Information? – The IOS-Example - Poster - Hans Bauer Library and Electronic Research Infrastructure Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg, Germany mailto:hbauer@ios-regensburg.de Abstract—Biographical and bibliographic data have much in common. However, biographical information within library infrastructures focuses on primary data such as name, date of birth / date of death, etc. Thus, libraries initially provide personal data in a structured form (what differs from biodata). As digitisation and the increase of electronic services are progressing, libraries are gaining access to biographical resources beyond the only metadata. The poster refers to two Open Access resources, managed by the library of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies Regensburg (IOS), and discusses strategies to open them up to further enhancement: the Erik Amburger Database and the BioLexSOE online. Keywords—biographical dictionary; biographical database; library; authority files; Open Access I. LIBRARIES, INDEXING, AND THE PERSON Musil’s famous librarian from the Austrian State Library characterises his strategy of knowledge organization as follows: “[…] if you want to know how I know about every book here, I can tell you: Because I never read any of them. […] With the exception of the catalogue.”[1] Albeit this is of course a shortened and pointed statement, librarians like to mention this quote from the Man without Qualities. The reason may be that Musil touches an often unseen fact, pivotal for librarian consciousness: even more than books, even more than content libraries organize and manage data referring to them. Indexing, the art of describing entities with distinct terms – metadata – is one of the crucial librarian’s tasks. Thus, libraries have developed powerful tools to identify entities in all subjects as unambiguously as possible. Authority files like the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND)[2] combine different designation variants for named entities. The data sets contain not only preferred names for an informational object but definitions, references, relations, based on the GND- Ontology.[3] Actually, the GND manages more than 10 million records about persons and person names. However, the way libraries deal with persons differs from the biographer’s approach. Biographical information within library infrastructures initially focuses on primary data such as name, name variants, date of birth / date of death, etc. Libraries are primarily interested in identifying individual entities, and not in creating narratives. Therefore thesauri, authority files, and other classification systems are maintained. Librarian descriptions of persons are able to provide personal data, but not biographical data.[4] Personal data, according to Bourdieu and following Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, are used as rigid designators, forcing identity for extern (social or institutional) purpose.[5] The availability of this kind of data is required to manage big amounts of information like in libraries or in mass prosopographies like registration databases. They serve to mark up individuals and to reduce problems of redundancy and homonymy, “[…] but these basic facts do not provide a strong foundation for a more complex and interconnected depiction of lives online.”[6] In summary library tools are highly appropriate for showing correlations and connections between entities / information objects, and for structuring resources referring to variant names.[7] But in contrast to biographies person data collected by libraries provide rather indications of lives than an insight into their course. Authority files like the GND are first of all indexing tools, they are not an encyclopaedia.1 Hence, Musil’s librarian’s strategy not to get into the subject matter seems to reflect a professional conviction: in knowledge organisation it’s all about