Hi there,
I would like to make a plea: can we consider a revision of the NCA Rules to stop what I think is a completely foolhardy practice of creating incorrect names?
I am talking about the rules governing hyphenated and compound surnames. For reasons that I don't fully understand, a decision was taken to enter these under the 'last entry element'. What this effectively means is entering the name wrongly.
E.g. Edith How-Martyn was a suffragette. I assume anyone looking her up or referring to her would reference her as 'How-Martyn'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_How-Martyn)
Similarly, we speak of 'Lloyd George' not 'George' when referring to David Lloyd George.
But because our Archives Hub contributors are following NCA Rules when they catalogue, we get records for "Martyn Edith How, 1871-1944" or "Lewis, Cecil Day- (1904-1972) poet".
This problem is compounded because we endeavour to structure name entries with 'surname', 'forename', 'dates', etc. The more structure the better, in general, but not if you are identifying the surname as 'Lewis' and the Forename as 'Cecil Day'.
We've been thinking about name authorities, and we are part of the SNAC project to create EAC encoded name records out of EAD records (http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/), but we'll end up with a substantial number of wrongly created name entries as a result of this rule. This practice also flies in the face of the general move towards data mining and pattern matching that is helping many information communities to improve the utility of their data.
For example, if we want to match up the entries for the archival creator (free text entries) and the entries of their name as an index term (structured entries), it is somewhat more difficult to match "Edith How Martyn" as the creator and "Martyn, Edith How" as the index entry. Its not impossible, but it just adds to the complexity that is already involved in trying to make names machine readable and create 'same as' links.
I'd be really very interested to hear what others have to say about this. I feel that the rules were created when cross-referencing was commonplace, but now what is important is to have well-structured machine readable data.
cheers,
Jane.
Jane Stevenson
The Archives Hub
Mimas, The University of Manchester
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Manchester M13 9QH
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