FLHIG
 

Family and Local History
Indexing Group

Selected articles from the Newsletter

This review was originally published in the May 1998 issue of the Library Association Record,
100 (5): 263, and was reprinted in SIGGNL 20, pages 9 to 10 (February 1999)
by kind permission of Mr Muirhead and the Editor of the Record

Naming Names, from Da Vinci to Du Maurier
by Graeme Muirhead of Solihull Libraries

Review of Rules for the Construction of Personal, Pace and Corporate Names, published by the National Council on Archives 1997; iv 130pp. ISBN and price not known.

In her UmbrelLA 4 paper in Manchester last year, Pat Oddy of the British Library made the point that "access points are the most important part of the [bibliographic] record when we consider the catalogue as an organic whole".

The individual records meet the needs of people requiring a specific bibliographic item - they fulfil the "finding list" objective of the catalogue. The access points do the really clever work of linking and bringing together works, names and subjects across the collection. Consistency in the way headings are constructed is therefore vitally important, and data exchange and remote access to catalogues mean that consistency has to extend beyond individual collections and catalogues.

These rules aim to help cataloguers of archives and manuscripts to achieve this consistency and to form names for persons, places and corporate bodies which are "unique and readily identifiable by users". They are the necessary first step towards the creation of a national authority file, which NCA hopes to explore imminently.

Whether or not these departures will really assist archive users is arguable. for example, compound names and surnames with separately written prefixes are always entered under the last element, regardless of country of origin (thus Dieskau, Dietrich Fischer- is preferred to the more obvious Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich; Maurier, Daphne du is preferred to du Maurier, Daphne) and real names are always given precedence over pseudonyms, regardless of whether or not anyone has ever heard of the real name (most users would look for John le Carré, not David John Moor Cornwell).

However, automated systems make retrieval possible using any element of the name or pseudonyms, so this is not realy an issue, One minor point which should be corrected in any future edition is Example 3 under Rule 2.3C.1, which shows Leonardo da Vinci wrongly entered as Vinci, Leonardo da. [He] was born before 1500, and the relevant section is Rule 2.3E, "Special rules for medieval names", and in particular Rules 2.3E.2.2, which deals with forenames qualified by toponyms (such as da Vinci).

[I have to say I sympathise with the line taken in the Rules regarding surnames with separately written prefixes. Regarding compound surnames, I suspect that users of genealogical indexes would find it useful to have them entered under both parts, not just the first or final part. If a compound surname derives from the joining of two families, then those tracing each family would need to have their attention drawn to both parts. Similarly for peers; George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham would need to be entered under both "Villiers" and "Buckingham". There is more on this in the article on the Complete Peerage.  - Ed.]

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