Find a person in the BnF authority file
search_authorsFind a person in the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority file by name, returning the identifier used by other tools. Distinguish between multiple records using birth year, death year, and role.
Instructions
Find a person in the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority file by name, and get the identifier the other tools take. This matches the name the BnF records, so it takes a surname, a full name or both names in either order. It does not read biographies, so it cannot find a person from what they wrote or what they did. It reads the person records and nothing else: an organisation, a conference or a place is outside it, and an answer holding no row says nothing about those. The match is letter for letter, so a name written with other accents or under another transliteration is a different search: try the spellings a library would use before concluding the BnF holds nobody of that name. Several rows can carry one name: the BnF keeps more than one authority record for some people, and many people share a name. Read 'birth_year', 'death_year' and 'role' to tell them apart, and show the caller the choice rather than picking one. Rows come back ordered by the address of the record, which is not an order of relevance. That order is the one the pages are cut along, so paging through a search reaches every match once. One search reads a fixed window of the index. 'index_window_full' says whether that window came back full: when it did, names sit past what was read, 'has_more' being false says where the reading stopped, and another reading of the same search can bring back other rows. Narrow the name to reach further.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| name | Yes | The person's name, such as 'Rimbaud' or 'Arthur Rimbaud'. | |
| page | No | ||
| limit | No |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| name | Yes | The name asked for. | |
| page | Yes | ||
| notes | Yes | ||
| authors | Yes | ||
| has_more | Yes | Whether the endpoint held at least one further row beyond this page, within the window the search read off the index. Read it alongside 'index_window_full': false on a full window says where the reading stopped rather than that the file holds nobody else. | |
| retrieved_at | Yes | When these metadata were read from data.bnf.fr, as an ISO 8601 instant. The BnF licence asks for this date to be stated wherever the metadata are shown, so repeat it alongside the source. | |
| words_searched | Yes | The terms the index required, each of which has to appear in the name. A word is cut at an apostrophe and at a hyphen before the index sees it, so a name written as one word can appear here as two, and a record carrying the pieces apart is a match. | |
| index_window_full | Yes | Whether the fixed window this search reads off the index came back full. True means records carrying these words sit past what was read, so the rows here are a part of the matches and another reading can bring back other rows. False means the window held everything that matched. Null when the endpoint stated no occupancy, which claims nothing either way. |