Biographical information is one of the most valuable sources for the history of science. The role of personality is hard to overestimate in understanding the development of social structures within the scientific enterprise. But the sources of biographical information are complex. The portrait of person can be found not only in biographical monographs, but also in scholarly writings, conference papers, archival collections of letters and documents. We can even find biographical information in such places as fiction and poetry.

This paper aims to discuss the difficulties of dealing with authority files for open access resources related to biographical research in history of science. It seeks to reveal contemporary challenges and future expectations to the biographical research.

When doing research through Internet-based resources, depending on the type of search performed, very different results will be returned. The fastest and easiest searches start with Google or Wikipedia; more advanced and professional searches include subject databases and biographical sources of learned societies. The most thorough searches will generally involve paid resources.

This paper will discuss authority files (such as the Library of Congress Authorities at http://authorities.loc.gov/ ) and the name Authorities Co-Operative (NACO) (see http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/naco/), the latter of which is a component of the Program for Cooperative Cataloguing. It is proposed that these authority tables can be of use in biographical searches.

The main idea of cooperative cataloguing is to unify authority data around the world. The main point of using authority files is to link authors’names to the proper person when there are a variety of spellings and when coincident given names complicate the search.

Library catalogues already have a careful way of dealing with these problems. Normed names in authority files are easily connected to all authors’ entries within electronic library catalogues, which means that it is relatively easy to obtain a ready list of an author’s scientific output. However, there is currently no good system for dealing with authority names on the open Internet.

This paper concludes with a series of questions and lines of discussion relating to developing and extending a more coherent searching system through the open access sources beyond the library catalogs. It proposes that these be addressed in the next four years by the Commission on Bibliography and Documentation of the IUHPS/DHST.