Message-Id: <9407082114.AA14491@ulua.hal.com>
To: sallyh@ludwig.intel.com (Sally Hambridge)
Subject: Re: URC Author Section
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 08 Jul 1994 08:47:18 PDT."
<9407081547.AA17037@Ludwig.intel.com>
Date: Fri, 08 Jul 1994 16:14:23 -0500
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
In message <9407081547.AA17037@Ludwig.intel.com>, Sally Hambridge writes:
>
>I suppose it's the librarian in me coming out, but I really have a
>problem with this construction of the author's name. Suppose I have a
>client, and I request that it fetch me URC's with the subject of
>"Shakespeare" and then sort those by the author's last name. Given
>this construction, how does the software figure out what the last name
>is?
Well said. The primary use that I can see for the Author: field
is for finding documents (resources) by author, and presenting
a list of citations sorted by author is a proven navigational
technique.
That said, we should encourage folks to use a representation of
the author's name that is most likely to sort consistently
with other authors' names, For example:
Author: Connolly, Daniel W.
I don't recommend specifying a way to parse the Author field to,
for example, sort by first name. But we could specify that if
an Author: field has a comma in it, it's all ready for sorting,
but if there is no comma, the name might not be in phonebook form
and might benefit from rearranging. So software might see:
Author: Fred Jones
Author: Connolly, Daniel W.
Author: International Business Machines,
and sort them as:
Author: Connolly, Daniel W.
Author: International Business Machines,
Author: Jones, Fred
I had considerable luck with the above hueristic back when I
was writing COBOL programs to munge junk mail postal addresses.
But you have to watch out for:
Author: James Thurston Howell, III.
It gets really tricky really quick. I haven't even begun to
look at the international issues.
How does BibTeX approach the problem of author names and sorting?
Some mention should be made of issues in convertiong RFC822 From:
headers to/from Author: fields. At a minimum, warn that there is
no reliable general purpose translation.
Dan