[Web4lib] Authors name standardization. Your opinion?

[Edward Spodick]

And do not forget that there may be more than one fully preferred/authorized version of an author's name, depending on what language or geographic region they are writing for.  All of these need to be linked.  And there are those who feel that a library catalog in one geographic region should not be forced to use the author name form which is preferred in another region, rather than in theirs.  Consider An author writing under their Chinese name - in complex/traditional characters vs simplified characters, versus writing under the romanized form of their name (and the romanization system may have changed, e.g. from Wade-Giles to Pinyin), versus writing under the English form of their name (which may be different from the romanized version).

If this interests you, consider checking out the work of K.T. Lam and Louisa Kwok at the links below.  They are colleagues of mine.

"XML and global name access control" from OCLC Systems and Services, available at
http://hdl.handle.net/1783.1/443
and
"XML name access control metadata repository: an experiment at HKUST library" at
http://hdl.handle.net/1783.1/668

and browse through the functional experimental
"XML Name Access Control Repository" at HKUST Library at 
http://library.ust.hk/info/nac/

-- 
Edward F Spodick, Information Technology Manager
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Library
lbspodic at ust.hk  tel:852-2358-6743 fax:852-2358-1043