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I hope my question about Regine’s proposal didn’t come across as flippant. I think she’s making a serious proposal. But my question is basically: how do you draw the boundary line between authors who just use different names and genuinely different identities?

Also, here’s one more question about her second principle: “
If the name can be determined to be an alternate identity, the attributes of the alternate identity apply, whether we choose to record them or not.” But what good would it do us to treat the person as a separate identify if we didn’t record them?  I think she gave two instances where we might not choose to record attributes.

 

Thanks,

Ted Gemberling

 

From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Gemberling, Ted P
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 1:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] Describing pseudonyms/real identities

 

I agree Queen, Ellery, 1916-2013 is wrong for the reasons people have given. But I’m puzzled as to why Jack Vance was not added as a 500 to the main Queen, Ellery authority record. Was there some reason the cataloger thought it was inappropriate to put him with those other authors?

 

Regine, you seem to put a lot of emphasis on attributes in your analysis of this problem. A different identity has different attributes. But I’m a little skeptical about the idea of attributes of fictional people. As that Atlantic writer pointed out, readers don’t generally care about the attributes of their books’ writers.

 

Now, Stephen Hearn pointed out that scholars may care about them, so it’s necessary to record them, even for fictional people. Maybe that’s enough reason to treat them as separate identities in your sense. But I feel there’s a bit of a conceptual problem: if a particular identity decided to use a different nomen, do you mean he just might not try hard enough to have different attributes? If he did try harder, I suppose we might never determine what his real name was.

It would be interesting if you would give an example of a person who has the same attributes but writes under different names.

 

Thanks, Ted Gemberling

 

From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Hostage, John
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 9:00 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] Describing pseudonyms/real identities

 

I agree, that NAR for Queen, Ellery, 1916-2013 just seems wrong.  If Ellery Queen isn't a bibliographic identity, I don't know what is.  Except that it's also a fictional character.

 

------------------------------------------

John Hostage

Senior Continuing Resources Cataloger

Harvard Library--Information and Technical Services

Langdell Hall 194

Harvard Law School Library

Cambridge, MA 02138

+(1)(617) 495-3974 (voice)

+(1)(617) 496-4409 (fax)
ISNI
0000 0000 4028 0917

 


From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Stephen Hearn <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 09:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] Describing pseudonyms/real identities

 

There is one edge case for the policy Stephen McDonald cites which I've been dealing with lately. When an author writes under a house pseudonym, I sometimes find that author's work under the pseudonym distinguished by the addition of the author's birth date to the shared pseudonym. Case in point: Jack Vance wrote a few novels under the pseudonym Ellery Queen. For that, he has an established alternate identity as "Queen, Ellery, 1916-2013," the Queen pseudonym with Vance's life dates. 

 

This seems wrong to me. As a kind of commercial brand, the house pseudonym needs to be a collocation point for works issued under the house name. We should be able to credit Vance's relationship to the novels authored under Queen without parsing out the Queen authorial identity itself, which should be retrievable with a single identity URI, among the several authors who wrote for it.

 

As Steven Folsom noted, sometimes it's the relationships that need refining rather than the entity descriptions. More nuanced relationships that would let us assign a known pseudonym, especially a shared or house pseudonym, as the "attributed author" and a separate name or names (when known) as simply "author" for the same work would be one better way to deal with such cases.

 

Stephen