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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
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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