On Wed, February 23, 2011 7:42 am, Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér wrote:

>  I suddenly find myself uncertain as to the approach - I was looking
>  into some books by Gogol.
>  I found
>  http://openlibrary.org/books/OL8839145M/Nouvelles_de_Petersbourg - the
>  name was simply listed as "Gogol", which I changed to "NikolaÄ­
>  Vasilʹevich Gogolʹ". While transliteration always leaves a bad taste in
>  my mouth, it is certainly more exact than what it was before. I am now
>  merging some various author variations of Gogol, but: Should some kind
>  of detail not reflect the particular spelling applied in the individual
>  book?

"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

It seem to me that the notion of an "authoritative" name is so 19th century.

What I would expect is an author record that permits an unlimited number of
Also Known As's without any indication of preference (i.e. /every/ name is an
alternate name). Every edition by this author MUST point to the author record
without attempting to indicate a name preference. An edition MAY include a
"statement of responsibility" which records the author's name as it appears on
that particular edition. The statement of responsibility is not authoritative
as to identity, but only a record of an historical artifact.

I have no idea whether OL is actually structured this way, this is simply what
my expectation would be. It is often hard to massage data appropriately in
order to make it fit into what is obviously a card catalog model.

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