Jonathan,
I realize that the undifferentiated practice is not exactly what Jon was
proposing. I was only saying there's a certain similarity between the
two things, based on a stress on works and subjects associated with
names.
One tricky thing about authority work is that sometimes you don't know
for quite awhile what the bibliographical identities are. Sometimes you
have to look at lists of works published by people with identical names
and try to find patterns. Subjects and authors that appear similar at
one point may turn out to be distinct later. And lots of mistakes happen
in this area. Sometimes people see a vague similarity between something
published by one person years ago and something new that's come out, and
they go ahead and use that other person's established heading. They may
even get the gender of the new author wrong.
One thing I'm pretty proud of is that I corrected some mistaken
attributions for authors of NASA documents. Many of them had been
attributed to a Henry C. Yee who published something on traffic
engineering over 20 years ago. An authority was created based on that
one work. But then a Helen C. Yee began publishing on aeronautical
engineering for NASA, and many of her works were cataloged as by him. I
was able to get her authority set up and identify which works were
really by her. Of course one problem is that she generally signed her
works simply as "H.C. Yee." I hope she's stopped doing that now!
--Ted Gemberling
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 3:43 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Next Gen Catalog and FRBR
No, no, putting them all in one authority record is definitely NOT the
approach Jon is suggesting.
Even if there ended up being two people _displayed to the user_ as
"Smith, John (astronomy)", they could still be two different authority
records. This gets at the point I tried to make a while ago on the RDA-L
list about the difference between a "linking identifier" (used to
uniquely identify a record to a machine) and a "name/label identifier"
(used to display in an interface to a user).
http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/two-meanings-of-identifier/
But I still like the idea of _automatically_ looking in the catalog to
see what LCSH's are commonly attached to a particular identity, and
displaying a summary of that to the user, perhaps in addition to the
dates already shown. That doesn't need to effect how authorities are
actually generated at all. Change the name/label identifier, without
changing the linking identifier.
Jonathan
Ted P Gemberling wrote:
> Jon,
> There was some discussion of that approach on the PCC list last year.
> The problem is that dates are much more likely to be unique than
> subjects. Especially since subjects are somewhat general. If there's a
> "Smith, John, writer on astronomy" set up, it won't be long before
> there's another person who'd have to be described the same way. Of
> course even dates aren't always completely unique. Occasionally you
have
> to add the exact date. For example, there are three John Smith,
1924-'s,
> so two of them have the month and date added at the end.
>
> Your proposal is really already in effect in "undifferentiated" name
> headings. If you can't get any more information about several people
> named John Smith, you put them all on one authority with descriptions
of
> the different things they wrote. The undifferentiated heading for
Smith,
> John is a really good example of that. When more information is found
> about one of them, that "bibliographic identity" is removed from the
> undifferentiated authority.
> --Ted Gemberling
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jon Gorman
> Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 3:48 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Next Gen Catalog and FRBR
>
> On 5/14/07, MULLEN Allen <Allen.MULLEN_at_ci.eugene.or.us> wrote:
> > I am of a mind, however, that authority control as presently
> configured is
>
>> designed by and largely for librarians than other users. Birth dates
>> and initials as a primary means of differentiating names in a browse
>> listing is pretty sad customer service. [OK, do I want the Mullen,
>> Allen born in 1957 or the one with middle initial Z. born in 1923 or
>> perhaps the one with a middle initial P. and born in 1988? - yikes!]
>>
>>
>
> One thing that I've mentioned other places that I've always been
> struck that libraries don't help sort out authors by the one key piece
> of information they already have....what did they write? It's
> entirely possible that someone may be looking for works by an author
> and not think to look up a particular title. But what if they were to
> see a list of some of the titles associated with an author as
> browsing? I would hope it could help them quite a bit in figuring out
> that "Smith, John" that wrote "Dynamics of ferrate compounds" might
> not be what they're looking for, but the "Smith, John" who wrote "25
> ghastly ways to die" and "Murder in the Rogue's Morgue" might be that
> mystery author they've heard about. Subject headings used in their
> work also might help.
>
> I haven't had enough time to implement something like this, but I'd
> really like to try an author search that doesn't throw you immediately
> into a pile of titles. Instead, it'll give you the chance to narrow
> down the author or likely authors, then return the books. Worldcat
> Identities look like a similar approach.
>
> Jon Gorman
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Tue May 15 2007 - 16:24:33 EDT