Interlinking of collections: the quest continues

After an excellent talk today about LibraryThing by LibraryThing's Tim, I got enthused to see how LibraryThing stacks up against other libraries for having matches in it's authority control system for entities we (the NZETC) care about.
The answer is averagely.
For copies of printed books less than a hundred years old (or reprinted in the last hundred years), and their authors, LibraryThing seems to do every well. These are the books likely to be in active circulation in personal libraries, so it stands to reason that these would be well covered.
I tried half a dozen books from our Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection, and most were missing, Erewhon, of course, was well represented. LibraryThing doesn't have the "Treaty of Waitangi" (a set of manuscripts) but it does have "Facsimiles of the Treaty of Waitangi." It's not clear to me whether these would be merged under their cataloguing rules.
Coverage of non-core bibliographic entities was lacking. Places get a little odd. Sydney is "http://www.librarything.com/place/Sydney,%20New%20South%20Wales,%20Australia" but Wellington is "http://www.librarything.com/place/Wellington" and Anzac Cove appears to be is missing altogether. This doesn't seem like a sane authority control system for places, as far as I can see. People who are the subjects rather than the authors of books didn't come out so well. I couldn't find Abel Janszoon Tasman, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero or Charles Frederick Goldie, all of which are near and dear to our hearts.

Here is the spreadsheet of how different web-enabled systems map entities we care about.

Correction: It seems that the correct URL for Wellington is http://www.librarything.com/place/Wellington,%20New%20Zealand which brings sanity back.

Place name inconsistencies

I've been looking at the "Dataset of New Zealand Geographic Place Names" from LINZ. This appears to be as close as New Zealand comes to an Official list of place names. I've been looking because it would be great to use as an authority in the NZETC.

Coming to the data I was aware of a number of issues:

1. Unlike most geographical data users, I'm primarily interested in the names rather than the relative positions
2. New Zealand is currently going through an extended period of renaming of geographic features to their original Māori names
3. The names in the dataset are primarily map labels and are subject to cartographic licence
   

What I didn't expect was the insanity in the names. I know that there are some good historical reasons for this insanity, but that doesn't make it any less insane.

1. Names can differ only by punctuation. There is a "No. 1 Creek" and a "No 1 Creek".
2. Names can differ only by presentation. There is a "Crook Burn or 8 Mile Creek", an "Eight Mile Creek or Boundary Creek" and an "Eight Mile Creek" (each in a different province).
3. There is no consistent presentation of alternative names. There is "Saddle (Mangaawai) Bivouac", "Te Towaka Bay (Burnside Bay)", "Queen Charlotte Sound (Totaranui)", "Manawatawhi/Three Kings Islands", "Mount Hauruia/Bald Rock", "Crook Burn or 8 Mile Creek" and "Omere, Janus or Toby Rock"
4. There is no machine-readable source of the Māori place names with macrons, and the human readable version has contains subtle difference to the machine-readable database (which contains no non-ASCII characters). For example "Franz Josef Glacier/Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere (Glacier)" and "Franz Josef Glacier/Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere" differ by more than the macrons. There appears to be no information on which are authoritative.

Right now I'm find finding this rather frustrating.

(grammar edit)