OK, I see what you're doing, but it's not the same as what happens in
library authority control. Library authority control is about actual
forms of the name that have been used in publications, and forms of the
name that might be used for searching. It's not a matter of substituting
initials for full names algorithmically. Some systems do that as part of
indexing, but that's not the same thing.

In your example, you have an "authoritative" form, J Edgar Hoover, which
you can always reduce to JE Hoover if you want. But you can't expand it
to John Edgar Hoover, which is his full name. If you want to carry all
forms of his name in a MODS record you will need J Edgar Hoover, which
is how it will appear in citations, as well as John Edgar Hoover, which
is a variant form of his name. Or a better example is T.C. Boyle, who
wrote his first books under the name T. Coraghessan Boyle.  If you put
both of the forms of his name in your MODS record, how will you know
which one is authoritative?

kc

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

> On Feb 19, 2005, at 12:39 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>> when you formulate a citation you will probably want to use only one
>> name form. How will you know which to use?
>
>
> An authoritative form richly marked-up is the easiest.

>
> In MODS these days, I code names like this:
>
> <name type="personal">
>   <namePart type="given">J</namePart>
>   <namePart type="given">Edgar</namePart>
>   <namePart type="family">Hoover</namePart>
> </name>
>
> I then use some XSLT logic to handle initialization when I need it
> (take the first character of each given namePart) and when not (append
> a period to a given namePart with a single character).
>
> It's not ideal because a) it relies on order of the nameParts for
> proper rendering, and b) the logic that determines the "J" is an
> initial is implicit, but it's worked for me.
>
> Still, this is why I was suggesting names be carefully considered for
> MADS.
>
> Bruce
>


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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
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