Providing personal information in authorized forms of a name is an issue, because authors complain. One of the concerns is identity theft. I'm not too concerned about 670 fields because this is usually not available to the public, and people besides catalogers aren't likely to know to go looking for the 6xx details in the authority records, even if they could access it someway. I'm not saying no cataloger would ever consider committing identity theft--just that statistically it greatly reduces the possibility if only catalogers are seeing the information.
It is the new MARC fields that allow public access to more useful details which might make authority records interesting as targets of identity thieves. Having said that, I agree with those that have commented that the information is already available to the public--often online--so we aren't posting confidential information. Perhaps we should consider NOT including mothers name since that is the most frequent piece of information requested for identity security purposes.
Mary L. Mastraccio, MLS
Cataloging & Authorities Librarian
MARCIVE, Inc.
San Antonio Texas 78265
1-800-531-7678
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www.marcive.com
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