hi, fyi, the proposal that initiated the more radical proposal from CPSO was from the Music Library Association, Bibliographic Control Committee, Authorities Sub-Committee. the original proposal was simply to allow NACO libraries to add brief death date information to 680 (Public General Note) [or to 678--Biographical or Historical data--it is not clear whether 678 is public or not]. the intention was to allow for the display of information about a person dying, even though the heading itself may not have a closing death date. the hope was that such a public note would eliminate some of the problems associated with the open dates--letting the public know that we know that bob hope died even though the heading has an open date. that hope may be naieve because of the lack of including authority records in keyword indexes in most (or all?) systems. i still haven't formulated an opinion about cpso's radical proposal to allow for the change of existing headings by adding dates at will. although we are about to enter the high tech land of frbr, etc., i just don't see how it's going to be possible to synchronize thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of library catalogs. maybe that argues in favor of the radical proposal--since library catalogs are already un-ynchronized, what would be the harm of changing headings willy-nilly by adding dates? --ralph p. A. Ralph Papakhian, Indiana University Music Library Bloomington, IN 47405 812/855-2970 [log in to unmask] co-owner: [log in to unmask]