# Re: URC Author Section

Steven D. Majewski (sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu)
Fri, 8 Jul 1994 18:03:28 -0400

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    Date: Fri, 8 Jul 1994 18:03:28 -0400

    From: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu>

    Message-Id: <199407082203.AA22636@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>

    To: Sally Hambridge <sallyh@ludwig.intel.com>, ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu,

    Subject: Re: URC Author Section

Having recently gone thru a project where one of the hairier problems
was converting names that were in all sorts on formats ( "First M.
Last" vs. "Last, First M.", and don't forget "Jr.", "Sr.", I/II/III/...
tacked on there in various places, sometimes with typographic errors of
dropping commas and periods ) with all possible variants of "legal" and
"illegal" to recognize... I almost scream just THINKING about it
again! :-0 <scream!> It required some rather arbitrary heuristics,
and if there really *IS* a "Mr I" out there, my profound appologies
for mistaking you for "... the First" ! :-> ) ...

I would MOST STRONGLY concur with Sally's opinion that
you spend a little more time thinking this part thru.

If it is difficult to reproduce all the cultural variants from a
more stiffly standardized syntax, then perhaps there should be two
parts: A standard encoding that is unambiguous, and a "presentation"
field ( I don't want to call it a "comment" field - we ran into that
mistake before! :-) that contains the unparsed ( and unparsable )
name in the format the author would most like it printed.

What do the library standards do with this problem ?

- Steve Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics

On Jul 8, 8:47, Sally Hambridge wrote:
>
> One of the reasons librarians have agonized over figuring out who the
> author is and getting names in a standard format is for just this reason:
> to provide a sorting mechanism when searching and retrieving by something
> other than author's last name.
>
> > o Author:
> > This pair will encode the name of the Author of a given document or
> > resource. Since many cultures have different ways of writing names
> > there are no requirements on how a name should be written. Thus it is
> > encouraged that users encode names in the most common format i.e.
> > first, middle and last in English societies.
>
> > Example:
>
> > Author: Michael Mealling
>
> We might want to consider standard library ways of representing
> names (gasp!), or if that's too conservative, what about the ISO
> construct of Family Name and Given Name?
>
> Using standard library construction (whatever is standard to each country)
> should also answer Jim Davis's concern about multiple authors and corporate
> authors. I'd hate to see us agonize over creating a code for every
> contingency (esp. since librarians have already done this) but I believe
> this area requires more thought.
>

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