Blue Sheet on Lake Frome, CSIRO Atmospheric Research, 2006, http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/208815062
The picture above shows scientists from CSIRO’s Earth Observation Centre helping to test a new NASA satellite. Imagine trying to get a satellite to spot you when you’re a tiny person standing in the middle of a vast white salt lake in South Australia. How would you do it? You would need to be distinctly different to your surroundings. In this case they threw out a big blue sheet and hey presto—they’re visible from space.
It nicely illustrates the problem we face at Trove—trying to uniquely identify a single Australian when we add them to our ‘People and organisations’ zone. We already have records for almost a million Australians, and some given names run strong through generations of families. How can we tell that this new William White is different to the 44 other William Whites?
One of the latest systems to help with this is a service called ORCID. ORCID is a non-profit, community-based organisation which aims to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. ORCID assigns a 16 digit number, a unique identifier, to any researcher who wants one—be they an astrophysicist studying the universe, a zoologist studying amoeba, or anyone in between.
The ORCID website helps a researcher bring together all the aspects of their career in what becomes the online equivalent of a CV. It includes the publications they’ve authored, information on where they’ve studied, positions they’ve held and the funding they’ve received. Worldwide, more than 1.2 million researchers have signed up for an ORCID profile...
For the rest of the post: http://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/trove/2015/04/27/spot-the-blue-square
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