On 04/27/2011 10:40 PM, J. McRee Elrod wrote:
<snip>
This is one change I would like to see, but as an AACR2 revision
rather than requiring a new set of rules.
It would be advantageous to have a single main entry for Geronimo
Stilton works, and have works produced under that pseudonym brought
together in the catalogue and on the shelf.
That the pseudonym is personified as a mouse or cockroach is beside
the point. The author is writing under than name.
</snip>
I agree that all of these changes could easily have been handled through
AACR2/LCRI revisions.
I have done a little bit of looking around at the question of authorship
and found an interesting article from The Indexer vol. 18, no. 2 Oct.
1992, "Name of an author!" by Anne Piternick.
http://www.theindexer.org/files/18-2/18-2_095.pdf Traditionally, there
has been focus on the idea of finding the real author of a resource and
trying to add that person's name.
From my own researches previously, I discovered lots of problems
originally with the concept of corporate authorship, i.e. how can the
"United Nations" author anything? This item could not have been written
by an entire organization but by specific individuals. I have still had
to argue this with non-specialists. In the old days, anything with no
specific author, e.g. a journal of a learned society, was handled as an
anonymous work. Slowly, the idea of corporate author came forth (Panizzi
was first, I believe) and there have been lots of changes since then.
We have also seen changes in how pseudonyms are handled, the concept of
bibliographical identities, and so on.
Concerning spirits, the author mentions them and cites a 1986 article in
Nature that was said to be written by God "as revealed to Ralph Esting".
She could not find the citation, but if we were cataloging this, based
on the "Spirit" rules, I guess the name heading would be "God (Spirit)"
which I find really bizarre, but is probably not any different from
"Archangels (Spirit)" or "Heavenly Spirit (Spirit)".
I haven't found anything about why spirit writings (or "channeled
books", or books written through channeling) are handled as personal
names, but it seems to be a very popular topic even today, and I could
imagine someone saying, "Well, who knows? This might really be the
spirit of Joan of Arc. Let's set them up as personal names."
Mr. Piternick also discusses computer programs, and questions if they
can write books. She mentions the Rachter program which wrote a book and
asks who is the author: the program or the persons who wrote the
program. (The book is online by the way
http://ubu.artmob.ca/text/racter/racter_policemansbeard.pdf. LC
cataloged it as title main entry with 700s for the two programmers while
poor Racter was left out completely) This reminds me of the wonderful
Postmodernism Generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ that generates a
completely meaningless essay about postmodernism. I hope we don't start
cataloging these essays!
My own opinion of Geronimo Stilton, which is not a spirit or pseudonym
but everybody can agree is a fictitious character, is that today, people
will search using keyword, as in Worldcat
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=geronimo%20stilton, and when they
choose a record, they should see some nice subjects with Geronimo
Stilton that can lead them to lots of other books.
Stilton, Geronimo (Fictitious character) -- Comic books, strips, etc.
Stilton, Geronimo (Fictitious character) -- Juvenile fiction.
This seems to be adequate access.
In my opinion, changing a long standing rule such as this will open up a
hornets' nest of associated complications that will be difficult to
decide upon, and even more difficult to find a common level of
consistency; all to achieve something that is of extremely limited
utility to the public, if any at all, which would be similar to what I
mentioned before with the changes to Russia/Soviet Union/Former Soviet
republics. It would be better to focus our energies in other areas.
--
James L. Weinheimer weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
