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PCCLIST  August 2013

PCCLIST August 2013

Subject:

Re: authorities for alternate identities

From:

CHRISTOPHER WALKER <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Program for Cooperative Cataloging <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 7 Aug 2013 15:29:31 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (275 lines)

Colleagues, 

Another option would be to imbed all the alleged attributes 
of a fictitious entity in the 670, as cited in the source, 
without cluttering the database with the birthplace, death dates, 
gender, and other coded information that will, as someone 
mentioned earlier, perhaps only irritate researchers who find Miss Piggy 
or Satan (Fallen Angel) among the hits from a query looking for 
female writers or fallen angels or whatever list the searcher 
may be trying to generate. 

Contrariwise, we might amuse ourselves starting editing wars 
over whether the "birth date" of a fictitious person is the 
alleged date mentioned in the source, or the publication date 
of the first mention of that person (or dog) in print. 

Batman (fictitious character), arguably, was "born" in May 1939, 
when Detective Comics #27 hit the stands. 


Christopher H. Walker 
Serials Cataloging Librarian 
Penn State's representative to the CONSER Operations Committee
Member at Large, ALCTS CRS Executive Committee 2013/2016 
126 Paterno Library 
The Pennsylvania State University 
University Park, PA 16802-1812 
(814) 865-4212 
[log in to unmask]
 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Hearn" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 1:29:54 PM
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] authorities for alternate identities


Maybe what's needed for simple pseudonyms is a different kind of relationship. Often the pseudonym is just an alternate name, not really an alternate identity; useful for retrieving a certain body of work, but not as a collocation point for a whole new set of identity attributes. If we had a subordinating relationship like broader/narrower for use with names, we could specify that Richard Stark et alii are subordinate authorial names for Westlake, inheriting Westlake's identity attributes and defining one or two attributes of their own to distinguish them from the general Westlake case, e.g., for Stark, $c (Author of books featuring Parker). With relationships specified in these terms, the logic of hierarchy would in principle enable us to do general retrieval on all of Westlake's works, or just those he wrote as Westlake, or just those written by Stark. (And it could replace the current use of suppresssed 500s and 663s, which basically disfunctional for search redirection.) 


This could also work for more fleshed out alternate identities belonging to a particular real identity, allowing for the odd duality of identity attributes that such figures possess. It would not address the problem of works created under an appropriated persona, like those by Sherlock Holmes or Satan, which are not really alternate identities for anyone in particular and should stand alone. 



The question of whether qualifiers such as $c (Author of books featuring Parker) should be used in practice is one of the issues raised by the report of the PCC Task Group on the Creation and Function of Name Authorities in a Non-MARC Environment, currently under review by PCC. 


Stephen 



On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Arakawa, Steven < [log in to unmask] > wrote: 






PS on alternate identities. I’ve been thinking about the NAR for Donald E. Westlake for training purposes, and I notice that some his alternate identities are established with dates and others are not; the base name (Westlake) is established without dates. I think in most cases, the alternate identities without dates were established to be consistent with the practice used for the base name, but that the alternate identities with dates (e.g. Richard Stark) were due to a conflict between the preferred name for the alternate identity with the preferred name of another entity. If dates for the real identity are not considered to be an attribute of the alternate identity, could we apply a standard practice of qualifying any alternate name conflicts like this?: Stark, Richard, $c (Alternate identity for: Westlake, Donald E.). Sort of like transforming the old “pseud” practice with a 21 st century qualifier. Since keyword searching generally doesn’t pick up MARC authorities 4xx, I could see some benefit in discovery systems that de-emphasize browse searches. 



On a related topic, does the new instruction under 9.19.1.7 allow us to qualify with, e.g., (Author of Borgia) when deconstructing an undifferentiated NAR if none of the other qualifier options can be applied? 




Steven Arakawa 

Catalog Librarian for Training & Documentation 

Catalog & Metada Services 

Sterling Memorial Library. Yale University 

P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240 

(203) 432-8286 [log in to unmask] 







From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto: [log in to unmask] ] On Behalf Of Stephen Hearn 
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 9:38 AM 


To: [log in to unmask] 
Subject: Re: authorities for alternate identities 








Responding to Steven's question--My guess is that the rule on not changing an existing heading unless it's wrong is what accounts for the use of a more complete 400 for Bachman, adding the date.via the 400 which can't be added to the established heading. Not a common or sanctioned practice, but I've been seeing it more often lately. The oddity of the attributes on the Bachman authority (046 gives only year, though month and day are known; other King attributes are given in a 670 with the birth date, but not repeated as 3XX attributes for Bachman) are probably evidence of uncertainty about how to treat pesudonymous identities. 





To me, both the King and the Bachman books were written by someone born September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, so those are attributes for both identities. Whether that should be represented by repeating the attributes on both authorities or specifying one authority where the full array of attributes will be found is yet to be determined. 





That is, if there are indeed two identities. The King/Bachman case also illustrates the erosion of these distinctions. In name/title authorities the title "Bachman Books" is now established under Stephen King while one Bachman novel not part of the Bachman Books anthology is still established under Bachman. Individual titles from the anthology like "Running man" still appear in LC's catalog under Bachman, not King. Given all this, I'd be hard pressed now to explain what makes the Bachman identity distinct. Going by what appears on title pages is an insufficient guideline when what appears on title pages varies from edition to edition and we want to have a single identifier for the work. 





Stephen 





On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Arakawa, Steven < [log in to unmask] > wrote: 



Related question on alternate identities: 



If the attributes of the alternate identity are supposed to be consistent with the alternate rather than the real identity, should we be including the real identity’s dates in the AAP of the alternate identity? If not, what qualifiers would be valid for the alternate form if it conflicts with a previously established form? 



Also, why is there a 400 for Bachman, Richard, 1947- when the AAP is Bachman? Is it because the alternate cannot have the real identity’s birth date but the cataloger wants to bring out the real identity’s date in the variant form? Should this be a model for real/alternate relationships? 




Steven Arakawa 

Catalog Librarian for Training & Documentation 

Catalog & Metada Services 

Sterling Memorial Library. Yale University 

P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240 

(203) 432-8286 [log in to unmask] 









From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto: [log in to unmask] ] On Behalf Of Ted P Gemberling 
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 3:35 PM 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Subject: Re: authorities for alternate identities 





Stephen, 

Here’s what Wikipedia says about George Eliot’s pen name: 

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes , with whom she lived for over 20 years. 

[end quote] 



Maybe that doesn’t amount to constructing a detailed male persona. 



You made some interesting comments about the problem of “ evolving and disparate perceptions.” It occurred to me that Eliot actually changed the way the public thought about female authors. It’s too bad she couldn’t publish under her own name, but when the public came to realize George Eliot was female, it hopefully made them less likely to apply such stereotypes to women. Maybe that’s the only way such changes can be accomplished sometimes. 



Ted 



From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [ mailto:[log in to unmask] ] On Behalf Of Stephen Hearn 
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 2:17 PM 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] authorities for alternate identities 




The gender of George Eliot is now widely known, so I'd see no reason to tag the George Eliot identity as male rather than female. Was there any effort on her part to construct a separate male persona beyond the name and its implicit gender assertion? 





The Galbraith case is more involved. Rowling invented a separate biography for Galbraith. If we assign Galbraith attributes from that fictitious biography including gender, then I'd argue we should label the identity as fictitious in some way. On the other hand, if we choose to disregard that biography and regard Galbraith just as a Rowling pseudonym, then I'd be OK with copying some of the Rowling attributes (birth date, birthplace, gender) to the Galbraith authority, or with omitting them altogether from Galbraith and letting the relationship to Rowling imply a common set of some attributes. On the other hand, we should distinguish between them in some way, e.g., when describing their Fields of activity--Rowling working in Fantasy literature and Fiction, Galbraith working in Detective and mystery fiction. Some pseudonyms would require finer grained distinctions, e.g., John Creasey's J.J. Marric as the author of Gideon mystery novels. And some might require something even more granular, e.g., specifying different titles in 672 fields and some appropriate title-referencing phrase in 368. 





That's what bothers me about the Carroll/Dodgson authorities. If there's a point to keeping bibliographic identities separate, it ought to be reflected somewhere in the attributes assigned to each identity. Carroll writes fantasy and nonsense literature, Dodgson writes sermons and works on mathematics and logic. If we're going to give them a single shared description, that seems close to saying that their bibliographic identities are no longer associated with specific bodies of work. Which may be the case, given how the Carroll name now overshadows the Dodgson name in most publications; but in that case, isn't it time to treat Dodgson as a 400 because the world no longer regards them as separate identities? The rule allowing work titles to be reassigned to a different author name as publishers reissue works under a writer's more popular name (RDA 6.27.1.7) suggests that our authorized access points ultimately follow current publications and perceptions more than original authorial intent. 





Maybe the underlying problem is that RDA instructions and authority practices can't cope well with evolving and disparate perceptions. They would have us to view the Carroll and Dodgson as fixed identities when the names and what they represent are actually fluid and varying based on time and changing circumstances. Longing for stability, we are like the Red Queen, running hard just to stay in one place as the world moves under our feet. And as the Queen observes to Alice, " If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" 





Stephen 











-- 


Stephen Hearn, Metadata Strategist 


Technical Services, University Libraries 


University of Minnesota 


160 Wilson Library 


309 19th Avenue South 


Minneapolis, MN 55455 


Ph: 612-625-2328 


Fx: 612-625-3428 



-- 

Stephen Hearn, Metadata Strategist 
Technical Services, University Libraries 
University of Minnesota 
160 Wilson Library 
309 19th Avenue South 
Minneapolis, MN 55455 
Ph: 612-625-2328 
Fx: 612-625-3428

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