Organisation and Maintenance of Library Authority Files in Russia and Abroad

The article provides review of foreign and domestic publications on the problems of creation, development and use of authority files (AF) of names of persons, names of organizations, geographical names and other objects both at the international, national and regional levels. The paper presents analysis of the foreign experience of AF maintenance. The authors note that, due to the availability of universal collections and qualified specialists, AF formation abroad is usually carried out by national libraries. A substantive analysis of foreign publications has shown that national AFs (NAF) are characterized by data variability and diversity of approaches. The authors studied the experience of successful combination of NAF created according to different methods within the framework of the international corporate project — Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). The article notes that most of the Russian libraries do not use AF, since AF, created in republican and regional scientific libraries, as a rule, are not publicly available. At the same time, creation by a separate library of its own AF leads to high labour and material costs, and the formation of a large number of AF leads to the variability of the AFs created for the same objects. The authors conclude that for efficient use of AFs within the country, it is necessary to apply unified methods and rules for creation of authority records. Another way out is the application of the Semantic Web technology, which allows linking AFs created according to different methods. It is necessary to make maximum use of existing dictionaries or create dictionaries based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards.

Potentialities in Applying Foucault’s Discourse Analysis to World Bank Research

Applying the discourse analysis methods of Michel Foucault to reports researched and published by the World Bank may reveal certain kinds of thinking embedded in the work of the institution, and this may serve as an important resource or vehicle for understanding the relationship between the World Bank and the societies it services. Such insight is important because it acts as an international authority on the alleviation of poverty and inequality, and as an informative resource for other institutions and the public. For this reason, it is necessary to ensure its research does not cause unnecessary harm to the societies in which it operates, which are often vulnerable to external actors.

Introduction

The reasoning of international adjudicatory bodies in regulatory disputes is gradually producing a set of ‘global regulatory standards’ conditioning the exercise of States’ regulatory freedom and obligations. Global regulatory standards sit at the meeting point between domestic and international authority in a wide range of regulatory fields. Their emergence is the result of the increasing interdependence among States reflected in international law at the present time in history. This book enquires into the legitimacy of this new ‘standards-enriched’ international law, examining the part played by international courts and tribunals in its articulation, the interpretive techniques employed and the influence of the pleadings. These analyses point to the need for political attention to the emerging global regulatory standards, particularly if the relationship between international and domestic authority is to be governed through requirements for proportionality in domestic decision-making. The book goes on to examine a range of further challenges and opportunities arising in connection with the emergence of global regulatory standards. These include the accompanying reconception of sovereignty as conferred power, the need to address the fragmentation of international law, and the potential for developments in the status of private actors within international law.

Proportionality in Investment Treaty Arbitration

Chapter Eight continues Chapter Seven’s examination of regulatory coherence tests in investment treaty arbitration, turning the analysis to the controversial idea of relying on proportionality testing. The principle of proportionality is promising as a concept that could assist in the substantive balancing of international legal interests and the better co-ordination of domestic and international authority. However the difficulty with the adoption of proportionality testing by international courts and tribunals is precisely that it calls, when needed, for a value judgement to be taken as a matter of international law on the relative merits of the legal interests at stake. Proportionality testing does not ultimately accommodate domestic decision-making in the same way as many other regulatory coherence tests like those addressed in Chapter Seven and prior chapters. International courts and tribunals are rightly wary of such a concept. Proportionality is not accepted as a general head of review in common law jurisdictions and does not qualify as a general principle of law. The introduction of proportionality through international adjudicatory process is likely to undermine rather than enhance the procedural justification of international law’s legitimacy claim. The chapter proposes three ways in which proportionality testing should be refocused, if it is to be employed.

Territorial factor of segregation of Russian citizens living abroad

A person’s place of residence often plays a significant role in his fate; moreover, it can act as a discriminatory moment. Specifically, the place of residence of a Russian citizen contributes to his reckoning with a certain caste, which can only be changed by changing the place of residence, and even then not always. In the conditions of modern Russian society, Russian citizens living abroad, especially in the countries of the “black list”, are often impaired in their rights; find themselves in a discriminatory position, which may indicate a kind of unofficial segregation. At the same time, legislatively at the federal level, this defeat in rights depending on the place of residence does not exist; however, it is implemented through laws of a lower order, as well as in the form of an unofficial policy in diplomatic missions, which, according to the convention, should, on the contrary, protect the interests of fellow citizens. Taking into account migration statistics, this type of segregation affects about 16-18% of Russian citizens, and this is a large part of Russian society. Such unofficial segregation can definitely deform Russian society in two directions: lead to a change in the structure of Russian civil society with the allocation of different degrees of citizenship to those more or less impaired in rights - this would legitimize Russia as a country disloyal to its own citizens - or force it to abandon discriminatory laws and traditional concepts, raising a new generation of officials and diplomats, which would contribute to strengthening the international authority of Russia in the world.

International Political Authority: On the Meaning and Scope of a Justified Hierarchy in International Relations (Voelsen & Schettler, 2019)

This article is a review of a paper titled International political authority: on the meaning and scope of a justified hierarchy in international relations written by Daniel Voelsen and Leon Schettler. The growing power and authority of international organizations has been perceived by many as a sign of a new global order where the concept of sovereignty of the state is replaced with the constitutional principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Recently, a tendency has been observed to consider international organizations as autonomous, legitimate institutions possessing political authority. However, it is rather challenging to find one and the complex understanding of political authority that encompasses all components that construct it. Voelsen and Schettler offer a detailed analysis of the concepts of international authority that are present in the literature and even criticize them. In this article, the conducted research is reviewed and scrutinized in detail.

Author identifier analysis: Name authority control in two institutional repositories

The aim of this poster is to analyze name authority control in two institutional repositories to determine the extent to which faculty researchers are represented in researcher identifier databases. A purposive sample of 50 faculty authors from Florida Southern College (FSC) and Ryerson University (RU) were compared against five different authority databases: Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), Scopus, Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), and International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). We first analyzed the results locally, then compared them between the two institutions. The findings show that while LCNAF and Scopus results are comparable between the two institutions, the difference in the ORCID, VIAF, and ISNI are considerable. Additionally, the results show that the majority of authors at each institution are represented in two or three external databases. This has implications for enhancing local authority data by linking to external identifier authority data to augment institutional repository metadata.

Author identifier analysis: Name authority control in two institutional repositories

The aim of this poster is to analyze name authority control in two institutional repositories to determine the extent to which faculty researchers are represented in researcher identifier databases. A purposive sample of 50 faculty authors from Florida Southern College (FSC) and Ryerson University (RU) were compared against five different authority databases: Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), Scopus, Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), and International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). We first analyzed the results locally, then compared them between the two institutions. The findings show that while LCNAF and Scopus results are comparable between the two institutions, the difference in the ORCID, VIAF, and ISNI are considerable. Additionally, the results show that the majority of authors at each institution are represented in two or three external databases. This has implications for enhancing local authority data by linking to external identifier authority data to augment institutional repository metadata.

Four Conceptions of Authority in International Relations

There is increasing agreement that states and other political actors on the world stage sometimes achieve international authority. However, there is less agreement about the nature and functioning of international authority relations. What determines whether an actor will be recognized as an authoritative actor? And what are the effects thereof? In this essay, we identify four distinct conceptions of authority in the study of international relations: authority as contract, authority as domination, authority as impression, and authority as consecration. Consideration of the typology leads to two important insights. First, the phenomenon of authority has an essentially experiential dimension. Subordinate actors’ emotional experience of authority determines their response to authority and thus also has a fundamental impact on the stability of authority. Second, the emergence of forms of international authority does not entail, at least not necessarily, the weakening of the sovereignty of states, but can equally be argued to strengthen it.

Measuring institutional overlap in global governance

Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, we make two contributions in the article. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed-dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive data set on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, to researchers examining the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.