Re: Ibidem: multiple versions of author's name

[David Mackinder <davemack>]

in a sense, you have to find a way of dealing with two competing ideals --
how to cite a published work correctly and how to keep track of an author's
changing name(s).

When creating an Ibidem record, I would be inclined to maintain a strict
policy whereby you enter the bibliographical information as it is given on
the title page (taking due note of any details that are given on the
copyright page -- in this regard American publishers [who give Library of
Congress details] tend to be much better than British, who frequently omit
British Library in Classification details and say 'copyright details are
available from the British Library . . . ' or some such]).

Information about author name-changes, or whether an author also publishes
under more than one name (e.g., Barbara Vine and Ruth Rendell are the same
person; the name indicates which type of book to expect from her), would
then be placed in the 'annotation' field.

The rest is dependent on how you search your database. If you perform only a
basic search for an author's surname, you will find only items under that
name; if you do a more thorough search (say for Vine & Rendell across all
fields) you won't miss any relevant records.

I tend to use 'aka' -- 'also known as' -- in the annotation field because it
is easily searchable and allows one to deal economically with alternative
names of authors and titles. I know that Ibidem fields allow one to specify
and automatically format 'previously published' titles, where a book was
previously known by a different name, but there are plenty of occasions
where, qua author, one would not need to place such information in a note or
a bibliography, even though, qua researcher, one might need to be aware of
it.

Joel Lidov wrote:

> I've puzzled over a similar problem in the case of people whose last
> name changed, so that they aren't even near each other in the
> alphabet.  My best advice now is to have the database reflect what is
> actually on the title page of book.  If this is intended for
> publication, you may find editors who have strong (and contrary)
> opinions about how it should be handled, so leave maximum information
> in the database, and fix it manually when the time comes.
> Alternatively (especially if footnotes are involved, so that it would
> be hard to fix it manually), put duplicate entries in the database --
> one for each name -- and, when required, go through and change the
> references manually.  This will make for work later, either way, but
> I fear it is past praying for that you can have a solution which will
> work for all occasions.  Bibliographic standards are simply not that
> standardized when it comes to problem publications.