One important aspect of the cataloguing we do in European Collections is authority work.  For every book that we catalogue, we check against the United States Library of Congress Name Authority File to make sure that the names of authors or subjects are “authorised”.  This is a way to ensure that different people who share the same name can be uniquely identified, and often results in dates of birth and/or death, middle names or initials, titles such as Dr. or words describing their occupation e.g. “historian” being added to a name in our catalogue to help us identify the correct person.  Having people uniquely identified in our indexes allows us to group together books by or about the same person. Continue reading “The lives behind the names: two Russian emigrés and one refugee from Nazi Germany” →