Jeroen wrote:
I think it is good practice to list the author name in the catalog the same way it appears on the title page. Easy, straightforward, and a pain in the * for people who like normalized databases....
One approach is OEBPS' use of Dublin Core, where for each creator/contributor, both may be included: the name as it appears in the publication, and a normalized name using the "file-as" attribute. As an aside, the OEBPS approach of creator/contributor, and the use of the "role"/"file-as" attributes should be looked at for the PG catalog/database. See: http://www.openebook.org/oebps/oebps1.2/download/oeb12-xhtml.htm#sec2.2.6
We should still link to a record that carries details for the author, and actually tells us that the author of Book A is the same as that of Book B, even though the name is different.
Interesting. Of course, using a normalized name (along with the birth/death years) is an excellent way to remove almost all ambiguity and result in something that is eminently machine readable. I suppose one could use some established catalogs (like the LoC) for coming up with normalized names. Since the PG corpus is still relatively small (compared to most libraries), it would not take too long for a few librarians to once and for all normalize the author/contributor names for each Work. It's simply a matter of deciding to do so, and making sure the effort is not sabotaged later on. (Of course, MARC records from established catalogs may also be imported and used.) Jon Noring