Quoting John Hostage <host...@law.harvard.edu>:
These corporate body access points for persons holding an office are
strange hermaphrodites that are peculiar to the Anglo-American
tradition, I think. The idea of using both a corporate heading for
the official and a personal name heading for the same person on
records for official communications was an anomaly in AACR2, and
even more so in RDA. It's not a case of 2 different entities having
responsibility for the communication; it's 2 different ways of
approaching the same entity. It would be better handled through
cross references on the authority records, which are made already,
than with redundant access points on the bib records. We could also
consider whether these constructed access points for officials make
any sense to anyone but catalogers.
They make fine sense if you look at browse lists of headings, er,
access points!
They may not help many users much, but they help cataloguers do their
work; and they gather together data for like documents. Try sorting
out official documents from prolific papal writers (John Paul II and
Benedict XVI both qualify!) without them! There is a different
bibliographic personality involved, if that's really a valid doctrine
(as applied to pseudonymous names).
Maybe we should think about access for both a pseudonymous name and
the "real" name of people who write both under their real name and
under a pseudonym. That would help greatly with collections and works
issued under different names in different editions; also for subject
treatment of a writer's oeuvre.
Hal Cain
Melbourne, Australia
hec...@dml.vic.edu.au
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