Most people have names. Many have at least two, a given name and a family name. Many people change their names throughout their life, for special events as taking a partner’s name on getting married or to reflect their current gender identity, or just for fun. Some of these people are authors, and that can create some challenges for people who handle authorial metadata.
Imagine an author writes a novel. It receives wide acclaim, the first printing sells out, and the publisher wants to do a second print run to produce more copies for sale. However, the author has changed their name since the first printing was done. Does the second printing keep the old name, or does it use the new name? If it uses the new name, does that necessarily make it a second edition, even though none of the book’s contents have changed?
The same problems are present if the name changes between the book being written and being published, or if there’s a sequel. Many systems (not to mention many human expectations) rely on a book having a single, unchanging author’s name attached to it. This blog is itself an example of such a system. When I changed my name, I updated the name field on my user profile, and all of the blog posts I’ve written are now shown under my new name. This is convenient in some ways; my blog is mine and it presents a unified experience of me to my readers. I’m uncomfortable being referred to by my previous name, so it avoids that issue on this website. But it creates at least two issues. First, I have erased some of my personal history this way. I can no longer distinguish between posts I had written while using my previous name and those written under my new name. Anyone reading through the post history here would see the new name consistently throughout and may not even know I’ve ever used another name. Second, if someone has cited an article I wrote under my previous name, anyone who follows that citation back here will experience a mismatch. Is this really the blog post that the author meant to cite? If the names don’t match, how can we know for sure?
This leads to the problem of multi-system interaction. Suppose a librarian was notified that I have changed my name, and decided to update the library’s catalogue software with my new name. They now are faced with a choice: if they change it for all of my books, then the print editions on the shelf will no longer match the record in the library software, making the books difficult to find. If they choose instead to only use the new name for new works going forward, users of the catalogue will not be able to determine that books by both names are written by the same author.
Some systems have the capacity to deal with this level of complexity to some degree. For example, a book written by Benjamin Franklin under the pen name Anthony Afterwit may have the latter listed as a pseudonym for the former, linking the two names. This again presents two problems. First, someone who has changed their name is not writing writing under a pseudonym, so describing either of their names as such would be inaccurate. The second problem is ethical: disclosing someone’s prior name may out them, for example an author changing name from John to Jane as part of their gender transition. Having that link established in a library’s catalogue system or elsewhere may not be safe for or desired by the author. But it could be problematic to not have that link as well, for example when researchers are trying to use citation information to conduct analyses or when a university is considering offering a tenure position based on publications.
Different organizations have published different recommendations for how to handle this question, eg the CR&L and the TMDC, as have individuals such as Jules Gill-Peterson. Unfortunately, there is no universally right answer. The ethical best practice when facing the decision of whether to link those records together is to ask the author what the right thing to do for them is. For a publisher working directly with the author, that would be straightforward. If every library in the country were to query the author when their new work is published, however, that quickly becomes overwhelming. In scholarly publishing, citations that include authorship would extend that burden to everyone who had cited the author’s work, and to bibliographic databases and beyond.
Of course, if your system doesn’t have a concept of an author independent of a work, changing a name on a record becomes difficult or impossible to achieve. If an author named Mary Smith becomes Mary Miller, one might be tempted to search for all the records where the MARC 100 record is “Smith, Mary” and replace them with “Miller, Mary”, but if there are two different Mary Smiths in the collection, this would change the author name for works by both of them. Linked Data standards like BIBFRAME and RDF aim to improve this situation by creating a concept of an author independent of their works, but they are slow to be adopted and involve additional complexity.
One final thought on this topic. Many of the names people use do not reflect the names legally associated with them. The idea that someone has a single “real” name that is their legal name, and that other names are simply pseudonyms, is not correct. Any name someone uses for themself is their real name. At various points in my life, I have had two different legal names at the same time (depending on which government system you asked), and I have had a single legal name that included two first names (not a first and middle name, two first names). I could use two different first names and either way it would still be my legal name.
All of this complexity also applies to author’s gender markers, ethnic and cultural groups, and nationalities. If you’re managing author metadata in a system like these, please do so carefully. If you’re building such a system, please ensure it includes enough flexibility to account for various scenarios, and provides ethical direction in addition to technical instructions. Technical systems cannot solve social problems, and a name is a social attribute more than a technical one.