Earlier this year, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey spoke about the visual side of the peerless Liberation Collection he has donated to the University Library.  This post, however, focuses on an unillustrated book whose interest, certainly for me as a librarian, lies in the identity of the author.

An important part of cataloguing work in the Library is what we call authority work – adding or editing records for people for the master authority file hosted by the Library of Congress.  Each record provides a unique main heading for an individual (eg Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885) and cites books where this and other forms of names appear.  By using this unique heading in a catalogue record, all works by or about someone will file together in a library index even if the person’s name might appear differently in each separate book (eg V. Hugo).

Many of the books in the Liberation Collection need this authority work.  More often than not, a new authority needs to be created.  Sometimes the author has a record already but we need to update it to note a different form of the name.  On the odd occasion, the book we are looking at is on such a different topic to those cited in the writer’s authority record that without further investigation we might assume that our author is someone different.

Continue reading “Identities and identification in the Liberation Collection” →