Adding Death Dates to Established Headings. Pt. 6

Since various changes to rules that restricted adding death dates to
date spans in established headings, NACO members have been remarkable in
their avidity for the practice. With remarkable efficiency and
judgement, we have collectively closed date spans in a large number of
records.

We have been rather too efficient in this in some regards. When
revising an established heading, even to close the date span, we must
also review the cross references. AACR2 26.1J calls for formulating the
cross references as if they were headings. In this particular context,
it means that, if a complete date span appears in the heading, it ought
also to appear in the cross references. LCRI26.1 gives further guidance
in formulating cross references.

There has been a regular flow through OCLC and LC of authority records
to which a death date has been added to the heading, but not to the
references. While this serves the immediate practice of validating the
entries on bibliographic records, forgetting to revise the cross
references does not serve the reference and identification purposes of
the authority record.

This causes further problems for systems which perform a check of cross
references to see if they match the heading. Forgetting to revise the
cross references as well as the headings causes manual work at various
other distribution points to repair this omission.

For example:

100 Di Stefano, Giuseppe, *d 1921-2008
400 Stefano, Giuseppe di, *d 1921-2008
400 Di Stefano, G. *q (Giuseppe), *d 1921-2008

Not:
100 Di Stefano, Giuseppe, *d 1921-2008
400 Stefano, Giuseppe di, *d 1921-
400 Di Stefano, G. *q (Giuseppe), *d 1921-