I too welcome this discussion and commend PoCo and John and Philip for
moving it along.
I like the idea of allowing the inclusion of subfield $0 with the
authority record control number in bibliographic fields as a way to help
with machine processing of these records. For example, when we send our
records off to our authority vendor, the presence of the $0 in fields
where a non-unique name is being used would allow the vendor to send back
the correct authority record to us. It would also allow correct flips to
bibliographic records later on if the heading gets changed. Including the
$0 might also simplify the process of controlling the headings in OCLC, so
that the software knows exactly which NAR to link to.
There is no discussion about another significant problem with our current
use of undifferentiated personal names. In the case where the names
normalize to the same thing, but are not actually the same because of
different diacritics, current practice is that the first person
established gets to be the 100 authorized access point. But in
bibliographical records, we are supposed to give the heading with the
correct diacritics for the particular person. That is all good UNTIL the
records are sent off for authority control, at which point the vendor most
likely matches against the undifferentiated authority and replaces the 100
field with the form found in the name authority. Not good. Unless we
keep careful track of these and go back in and edit them after vendor
processing (or unless the vendor has a procedure in place to not flip such
headings to the 100 form), we are mucking up our data. The same thing
could happen in local systems after the undifferentiated authority record
has been loaded in the local system: if automated flips are turned on in
the ILS, one could have the 100 with the correct diacritics flipped to the
name with a different set of diacritics (or none) that is really a
different person.
As an example of what I've been talking about above, see NAR n 80147573.
There are three different people whose name normalizes to Nguyen, An. Two
use different diacritics and one does not use diacritics. n 85195039 has
five people on it and four different names if you use diacritics as a way
of distinguishing them.
As Stephen Hearn suggested, it might be good to have a wider discussion of
undifferentiation. Must this be limited to personal names? Isn't the
heading for an ongoing conference really an undifferentiated corporate
body name? In RDA we will create separate authority records for each
conference. Might there not be situations where the cataloger does not
have enough information to use to differentiate a corporate body, family,
or geographic place or jurisdiction through the use of separate access
points? For corporate bodies, my mind immediately goes to names for
ships. I can envision cases where there is no way to differentiate
between ships with the same name, yet the cataloger does know that there
are multiple entities rather than a single one. So although RDA like
AACR2 only refers to undifferentiated personal names, I think we should
discuss whether the principle could be expanded for other types of
entities.
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Adam L. Schiff
Principal Cataloger
University of Washington Libraries
Box 352900
Seattle, WA 98195-2900
(206) 543-8409
(206) 685-8782 fax
[log in to unmask]
http://faculty.washington.edu/~aschiff
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