Referring to the concept of separate bibliographic identities, Laurence
said:
This concept is not part of the Anglo-American tradition, but it was
included in a revised edition of AACR2. In my opinion, it was an
ill-considered attempt to deal with the problem that some authors use
different names for distinctly different areas of activities. As Mac
pointed out, the solution deals very poorly with the fact that some
authors use different names for the same books and essentially dissolves
the personal connection between author and work. If the principle were
thought through, then a common name that is used by different people
writing for a series would be a separate authorial identity.
This is very interesting. I hadn't realized that this principle was only
introduced with a revision of AACR2 (I just tried to determine the exact
year - can it have been 1981?). I had also assumed that most catalogers
must be quite happy with the concept, as it's even being taken one step
further in RDA than it was in AACR2.
But Mac's example is really an eye opener. It shows that the connection
between a work and the name/pseudonym used by the author (or the
publisher) is not permanently fixed - as the relationship between a work
and its creator should be, in my opinion. Once you start thinking about
it, there are certainly more cases which are decidedly odd. When reading
up on it, I just came across an article by John K. Duke (Authors and
names : multiple pseudonyms in AACR2. In: Cataloging & classification
quarterly 1 (1981) 1, p. 77-90), which is worth reading. Among the
things which he points out are the following:
"It is apparent from numerous other rules in AACR2 that the general
intent is to gather together in one place all of an author's works,
regardless of the names under which they are published. For example, we
enter a work that is "erroneously or fictitiously attributed to a
person" under the real author (or under title if the real author is not
known) (21.4C1). However, a work produced under fictitious pretenses
would seemingly fall within the AACR2 definition of a pseudonym - "A
name assumed by an author to conceal or obscure his or her identity."
(p. 83)
"Consider the case of an author who writes in two genres, the first
scholarly and the second literary. For her scholarly publications, this
writer uses her married name. However, for her literary creations this
writer retains her maiden name. Clearly the maiden name is not a "name
assumed by an author to conceal his or her identity," yet it functions
in a way similar to many pseudonyms, that is, by distinguishing a genre
of works." (p. 83)
He also comes up with this nice example: "presume that we have a
collection of stories by one author, each of which is listed in the book
under a different pseudonym according to the way it was originally
published." (p. 86).
And his conclusion is: "The AACR2 rule violates the catalog's objectives
as formulated by Lubetzky, and is contradictory to AACR2's own internal
logic. The number of disadvantages to the rule far outweigh any
advantages. The rule should be replaced." (Abstract, p. 77).
When I first learned about the AACR2 concept of separate bibliographic
identities, it did make sense to me, e.g. when thinking of Lewis Carroll
/ Charles Dodgson. Obviously, if someone was looking for things like the
"Curiosa mathematica", they don't want to be drowned in editions of the
Alice books - which they inevitably are in a German catalog.
On the other hand, this is a rather extreme case, isn't it? My gut
feeling is that people will more often be interested in getting all
works by a person (no matter which name/pseudonym was used) than in
selecting only those which were published under a certain name/pseudonym.
I was just thinking of fantasy writer Robin Hobb (a pseudonym which she
has used since 1995). Somebody who likes the "Hobb books" might be glad
to be pointed to her other pseudonym, Megan Lindholm, which she has been
used since 1971. There is indeed a slight difference in genre: Both is
fantasy, but Hobb books are "epic fantasy", whereas Lindholm books are
"contemporary fantasy", so perhaps a reader might say "I like the Hobb
books better than the Lindholm books". But when you come to think of it,
this is not much different from saying, e.g. "I like Agatha Christie's
Miss Marple books better than her Poirot books". By the way, there is
also a book called "The inheritance", which is (I cite Wikipedia) "a
collection of short fiction by both Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm". In
the LC catalog, it has Megan Lindholm in 100 and Robin Hobb in 700,
presenting them as two different authors. I can see the logics in this,
but still: Curiouser and curiouser!
Getting all resources by one author, regardless of the name/pseudonym
used, is certainly much more difficult if a catalog works with separate
bibliographic identities. In our catalogs (without separate identities),
where authority records are linked to bibliographic records, users will
get the same result (even in keyword searching) whether they search for
Megan Lindholm or Robin Hobb. This will no longer be the case if we
adopt separate bibliographic identities. I assume we could change our
indexing in order to treat "see also references" the same way as "see
references" in the case of pseudonyms, but then: Where would be the
point in changing all the authority files, in the first place?
If it is indeed necessary to distinguish between different
names/pseudonyms (of which I am not totally convinced), I think it would
have to be done in a different way. If we try to design a theoretical
model for the situation, I believe there shouldn't be just two entities
with horizontal links, one for Robin Hobb and one for Megan Lindholm.
Instead, there should be three entities: The third one would be a "super
entity" which stands for the person as such, regardless of which face
(i.e. name/pseudonym) he or she is showing to the world. This super
entity would be hierarchically linked to the entities for Robin Hobb and
Megan Lindholm.
This would make it possible to either search for all resources related
to the author as well as to search only for resources related to a
specific name/pseudonym. In a catalog, the default for a simple search
could be to show all resources connected to the super entity (regardless
of which name/pseudonym was searched for) as a first step, but providing
facets in order to limit the results to a specific name/pseudonym.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we would have to create new authority
records for these "super entities". Another possibility would be to
simply have a "super identifier", which is included in all authority
records which belong together in this way. In Germany, we have been
thinking about introducing such super identifiers in another context,
namely that of corporate bodies. There, you often have a "family" of
chronologically linked corporate bodies. It might be useful to have an
easy way of searching for all members of such a family together
(especially in subject searching), and for this, the super identifier
could be used. This is still only a vague idea, but if we actually
introduce super identifiers, than I think we might as well use them for
separate bibliographic identities as well.
Heidrun
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Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Faculty of Information and CommuniCation
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
