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The question  is how to apply the Principle of Representation when representations conflict. The official author site for Robert Galbraith ( http://http://www.robert-galbraith.com/ ), which previously (apparently) provided biographical details about a male author, now clearly represents Galbraith as simply a Rowling pseudonym. Which representation counts for the Galbraith identity?

When we establish names with their identity attributes for use as authorized access points, we meet the needs of users who use those authorities as an aid for identifying a particular entity ("Which of these Richard Starks is the one I want?"). However, users who approach the authority file as a database through which instance sets of classes of persons can be retrieved may not be pleased to find fictional identities scattered through their results. Anyone who's played Who Am I? knows that one of the first questions asked is "Are you real?"  The deductive logic of narrowing down via class distinctions expects a different kind of truth from what the logic of representing an entity on its own terms necessarily provides. With an eye toward that future functionality, I think RDA should consider providing some standard way to indicate fictitious-ness. The list Gary Strawn provides shows that there is already scattering in the heading terminology for this status--"fictitious," "imaginary," "legendary," ... It should be simpler to exclude fictitious entities from one's search results if they're going to live together in the same file.

Gary's list also points to the problem of deities.  There have to be works which represent themselves as created by a named deity. How do we represent them? OCLC has a bunch of titles which purport to be by Satan. As they say, the devil is in the details.

Stephen


On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Moore, Richard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Stephen

 

“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.” In this case (and probably in most cases) I agree. It’s what we did before and there is nothing in RDA, that I can see, to preclude it.

 

What to do, though, when the author creates a fictitious identity for the pseudonym? In the case of Rowling vs Galbraith,  I don’t know whether the blurb on “The Cuckoo’s Calling” refers explicitly to Galbraith as male, but if so I might be tempted to add a 375 to that effect, following the Principle of Representation.

 

If I were to write under a female pseudonym, for which I created the fictitious identity of a female fighter pilot born in 1918, I think it might be appropriate to record my putative dates and gender, on the same justification.

 

Finally, for a fictitious character, the very reason we are crediting them as the creator of a work, and establishing a NAR, is this same Principle of Representation; I think if it allows their fictitious relationship to the work to be recorded, then it also permits the same for their fictitious attributes as a person.

 

Cataloguer judgement applies.

 

Regards

Richard

 

_________________________

Richard Moore

Authority Control Team Manager

The British Library

                                                                       

Tel.: +44 (0)1937 546806                              

E-mail: [log in to unmask]                          

 

 

From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stephen Hearn
Sent: 07 August 2013 14:38


To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] 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

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--
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