It has already been pointed out that the entire MARC authority record is readily displayed in the Library of Congress authorities online--can't get much more public than that. If it's necessary to contact the person whose name is being established, it might be a good idea to explain that the information will be publicly & readily available and whether all of the information provided by the author can be made public.
Some of the new RDA fields such as 370 Associated Place ("the town, city, province, state, and/or country associated with a person's place of birth, death, residence, and/or identity"), 371 Address ("the address of a person's place of residence, business, or employer and/or an e-mail or Internet address. The MARC scope note says "An address (as well as electronic access information such as email, telephone, fax, TTY, etc. numbers) associated with the entity described in the record."), maybe even gender (375) could be problematic. Information available in a widely used reference source (e.g. Wikipedia or the author's web page) is probably fair game. Can we use Facebook as a reference source?
Steven Arakawa
Catalog Librarian for Training & Documentation
Catalog & Metadata Services, SML, Yale University
P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240
(203)432-8286 [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mary Mastraccio
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 12:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Theses name headings and privacy concerns
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
[log in to unmask]
www.marcive.com
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