During development of the new African Studies Library online portal, I was faced with the task to implement an authority based search system. Without a more detailed specification, I first had to figure out, what that could be and how to implement it.

The authority data to be used were datasets provided by the German “Gemeinsame Normdatei”, GND for short. That is all fine and well, but nobody would enter GND-Identifiers like https://d-nb.info/gnd/121578437 in a search field, expecting any kind of meaningful result. That’s simply not practical. So let’s do something else. How about a search system delivering search results based on authority data as suggestions or recommendations? And no strange identifiers would need to be entered by users.