[posted] Re: REPosted (#7332, Liu)

[John Mark Ockerbloom]

Note to catalogers: It looks like the "informal" version of the
name (that is, when written out in ordinary prose) is "Liu Xiang",
not "Xiang Liu".  I'm not fluent in Chinese, though; others can let
me know if I'm wrong here.   The odd informal form appears to be
making it into the Gutenberg headers of the actual texts in some cases.

That said, the authority-controlled version of the name (the one
that appears in library catalogs) is

    Liu, Xiang, 77?-6? B.C.

I believe this reflects the fact that in many Asian countries,
the family name typically comes first rather than last.  So the
order is *not* inverted in the informal version, as it is when, say,
"Masefield, John, 1878-1967" becomes "John Masefield".

Unfortunately, I don't know of any obvious way to express this in
standard MARC format (or at least not one that catalogers seem to use),
so simply looking at a catalog entry might not be enough to determine
proper usage.  (What I've been doing is looking for other sources
that use the name and seeing what order they use in their texts.)

In my catalog, I have an extra subfield that specifies the informal
version to use if it's different from what a naive program would expect.
There may be other ways of dealing with this as well.

John






Al Haines wrote:
> Shouyuan, Volume 1-20, Complete, by Xiang Liu                             7332
>   [Language: Chinese]
>   [Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/7/3/3/7332 ]
>   [Updated edition of: etext05\8shou10.txt, 8shou10.zip]
>   [Files: ; 7332-0.txt]
> 
> 
> This file has been converted from Big5 to UTF-8, updated
> with the new header, removed from its old address in etext05,
> and filed under the new directory system.  
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks to Nicole Lai
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Al
> 
>