What’s in a name? – and how you can help

If you’ve ever tried Googling your name, and it happens to be something like John Williams, then you’ll know how frustrating that can be. Millions of results and no easy way to distinguish John Williams the guitarist from every other John Williams out there, both contemporary and historic figures. Useless!

Well, librarians have been coping with this problem for ages, long before the days of the Internet, and we came up with a solution years ago. We call it “authority control”. No it’s not some totalitarian gang of librarians laying down the law, just our way of calmly bringing some order out of chaos, distinguishing between different people and making sure that their creative endeavours and also works about them are correctly attributed.

So, how do we do this? Well, if we have two authors with the same name, but who are obviously different (they write about different topics and/or their works are from different time periods) then we look for a way of identifying them – what we call “qualifying information”. It may be their dates of birth/death, or their middle names, or if we can’t find these we might use the dates when they were actively publishing (what we call “flourish dates”, abbreviated as fl.) or if we can’t find any of these we can also use their profession, (e.g. photographer, engraver, merchant, zine creator), or even their place of residence.

Here are just a few examples of people called John Williams from our authority file:  

Some examples of Williams from our author file

Some examples of Williams from our author file

Librarians also have a way of dealing with people who have several names, or nicknames so we can link them all together. We settle on one as the preferred form of the name and then put in what we call “see references” to direct you from other variations back to the favoured form. For example, you might have heard of Lawrence of Arabia, but his real name was Thomas Edward Lawrence. Has much less flair, but is rather more accurate! Here is our reference for him:

Lawrence of Arabia entry

Lawrence of Arabia entry

So, that’s all very well, but what if we can’t even find the author’s name? Sometimes we have to create a catalogue record that doesn’t include an author, just the title and other publication details. But we do make a real effort to try and find the person responsible, however this is often a challenge for zines! If there is an email address then we may try sending a message asking for information. Please don’t be alarmed! We are not trying to breach your privacy, merely attempting to ensure that your work is correctly recognised.

We’ve catalogued a number of “anonymous” zines recently and would love to know the creator’s name. For example, Squeaky sneakers, Zinelove, Lark, Valet of the dolls, Well balanced and friendly.   

If you are the zinester responsible, or if anyone else knows who they are, please tell us so that we can update our records and give the creator the credit they deserve!

Unknown author

Do you know who created these zines?

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8 Responses to What’s in a name? – and how you can help

  1. Nick says:

    The efforts of libraries in managing name authority information is very impressive, as is the wealth of information contained in these files, but zines are a particular case that can be quite different from many other types of publications. Many zime makers intentionally publish anonymous zines, or create zines under various personas, therefore publishing name authority information from ‘anyone who knows who an zine author is’ may compromise an explicit publishing strategy of the author and should only be done with the permission of the author.

    • Julie Whiting says:

      Thanks Nick. I completely understand your point about the sensitivities involved and we would be very careful about including author information that was supplied by a third party.

  2. TimT says:

    Not me, but I wish I’d written the middle one. ‘Valet of the Dolls’ is an awesome title!

    A few years ago I read a letter in The Spectator talking about a fellow who sometimes appeared in the papers called Hugh Green. Apparently the papers in question were hoping that Hugh Green would one day quit his job become a concierge – as they had a sweet headline planned:

    HUGH GREEN WAS MY VALET.

  3. TimT says:

    For what it’s worth – if there’s ever confusion between me and another commenter called ‘TimT’, feel free to give me the nickname ‘Tim Cupof T’. You’re welcome. :)

    • Julie Whiting says:

      Well, our name authority records definitely give us the ability to include pseudonyms and alternative forms of names. So anything is possible ….!

  4. ampersand duck says:

    Valet of the Dolls was included as a re-run in Artlink vol 30, no 2… so I’d say the guest editor, Lucas Ehlein (of Big Fag Press) knows the writer :)
    There’s also a revised contact email for the author on the inside back cover in my copy – is it in the library’s copy? If not, email me and I can pass it on.

    • Julie Whiting says:

      Thanks very much for this information, it is very helpful. I’ll try contacting Lucas Ehlein.