A refine_viaf user recently commented that she would like to get Library of Congress IDs for the name candidates in OpenRefine, instead of VIAF IDs.
It would be ideal if the name IDs for LC and other sources could be additional fields in the JSON data returned from refine_viaf, which you could then extract using some GREL code. Unfortunately, OpenRefine doesn’t allow you to access additional fields on name candidate objects.
So I’ve created a separate “proxy mode” that returns IDs used by source institutions themselves, rather than the VIAF IDs. To use proxy mode, add a reconciliation service in OpenRefine using this URL format instead of the usual URL:
http://refine.codefork.com/reconcile/viafproxy/LC
One quirk is that OpenRefine will create broken hyperlinks for a few sources (at the moment, these are BNC, BNF, DBC, and NUKAT). This is due to the fact that the IDs in these URLs don’t match the name record IDs, which is a requirement for the hyperlinking mechanism to work properly.
In short, you can now use refine_viaf to reconcile “directly” against the name authority records of VIAF’s source institutions, which should be useful to many people.