Part of our ambition is to hold hands when as many other sources on the internet as possible. Currently we are only doing this for "people" (individuals or corporations) but our goal is to create mappings for as many first class objects in our collection (media, styles, periods and eventually objects themselves) as possible.
These are people who've had a hand in the Cooper Hewitt collection who we think we know about at another institution or in another database of people. As of this writing there are some mistakes in this list but it's mostly correct and a valuable resource and a step, however small, in the right direction.
This list was generated using some pretty naive code that really only concerned itself with names and concordances that could be inferred with the simplest of rulesets. There is lots of work to be done here but we opted for doing the easy thing first in the service of our collections website so as not to get stuck in the quicksand of edge cases.
Our hope is that people will use these concordances with their own datasets, help us improve the data by correcting the mistakes we've let slip through the cracks and by adding their own concordances for other data sources.
Concordances are listed on a per-record basis as well in the collection/meta/people.csv document.
We currently have one or more concordances between Cooper-Hewitt "people" and six other sources. They are:
Concordances are listed under the freebase:id column. For example
ch:id=18536279 is the same as freebase:id=m/01hlzm
Concordances are listed under the wikipedia:id column. For example
ch:id=18042217 is the same as wikipedia:id=908990
Concordances are listed under the viaf:id column. For example
ch:id=18042217 is the same as viaf:id=103648062
Concordances are listed under the lcnaf:id column. For example
ch:id=18042217 is the same as lcnaf:id=94029554
Concordances are listed under the moma:id column. For example
ch:id=18055621 is the same as moma:id=5392
As of this writing (2012114) we still need to do some work to merge the IMA's actor IDs with Cooper-Hewitt person IDs.
If you look carefully at our collections website you may notice that we also claim to have concordances with the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They are not included here because like the IMA they do not have public identifiers (and we haven't made any for them yet ;-)