I made a review file of the existing authority records in our system – more than 17,000 turned up, so on the face of it, this was too big a problem to ever tackle. Sending the records out to a vendor for authority control work was, I was told, not an option. Then I broke the problem down a bit and talked myself back in to handling it. Of those 17 thousand records, most of them are for authors who have long since left us such as Balzac, Twain, Shakespeare, the Brontes and Mencken, so I started going for the recent departures. Wikipedia has a handy year by year guide listing important deaths. An Argentinian sports announcer would not be found in our catalog but authors like Doris Lessing and politicians like Margaret Thatcher would be. Once identified, I found I could, in most cases, do the corrections for each departee in five minutes or less.
Working my way back to 1990, I found about a hundred important authors and statesmen who needed improved records in our system. One day soon I will make a list and display the names along with birth and death dates for the use of others interested in a summer project.
The world has changed since the whole concept of authority control came along. In the old days (I started my library career in 1966, so I know a thing of two about that), the library had books and journals, and they could keep their files in order using 3 X 5 cards. Now, in our library, more than 70% of the books are ebooks, and the records for them arrive in massive marc loads – hopefully the vitals for the authors match what we have, but there is no guarantee.
In very large libraries, this can guarantee a mess. I checked a number of A+ libraries and statewise union catalogs and found extreme disorder in some of them. One of them had half of the records for Doris Lessing showing the correct dates, and half gave her credit for still being alive. That’s not the only problem. Some prominent figures do not have birth OR death dates. Ronald Reagan, the messianic figure of the Republican Party did not have any years listed in most of the catalogs I checked. Same with Kurt Vonnegut, who would be amused by being unstuck in time. “And so it goes.”
I soon found out that the Gipper and Vonnegut were not just missing their dates in our catalogs – this was true in library catalogs across the nation. It seemed like a bit of a mystery, but I got one important clue just before I left for the week. The Library of Congress, the authority of all authorities did not show birth and death dates for these two men in their catalog. Looking further, I found Hunter Thompson, Maia Angelou, Harper Lee and Flannery O’Connor among the missing date honorees. Why?
Well, thanks to Kate James at the Library of Congress, we now know why. Birth and death dates are created to eliminate confusion when there may be confusion due to two people having the same name. The example she gave was John Ritter – the name of a, 18th century printer, and, of course the name of a modern actor. When he first started appearing in the catalog his birth date was known, so they added it to his authority record. When he died, they filled in that date. If he had not been given a birth date at first, his death date would have forever gone unnoted. Ronald Reagan first appeared when he made an audio recording in his days as a second tier actor, so they did not bother with birth dates for him, especially given that there were no other Ronald Reagans of note. Once he became president, it became impractical to go back and add dates – not only for the Library of Congress itself, but for the many libraries that align their work to that of the LOC. In other words, the decision of the judges is final. As for Vonnegut, they correctly determined that this name would remain rather unique, so dates were unnecessary. Same with Harper Lee and Maia Angelou, although you have to wonder why dates were added to the record for Sojourner Truth.
I went ahead and added birth and death dates to dignitaries like Richard Feynman or Robertson Davies. Once again it seemed like this was a very manageable project, but more surprises came my way. I found a very rich vein of authors who were born in the mid to late 19th century, with birth dates but not death dates. Either these people are 130 years old now, or the information is incomplete. I’d just go back to LC and get death dates. It turned out that the LOC catalog also was missing these death dates. In most cases I could get the dates from a source like Wikipedia. However, it appears that to do this right, it will take me the entire time between now and New Years. Just to satisfy my curiosity about how widespread this problem is, I checked one of my previous employers, because I know that they had a complete authority job done within the last ten years. It turns out that the company that did the authority work just took their data from Library of Congress, so that library has 130 year old authors as well.
Dates are not the only way to distinguish between similar names. Catalogers at LC also have the option of adding middle names to keep the parties straight. Next month I will celebrate my 50th anniversary of working in libraries, so it is a pleasure to learn something about the field that had completely escaped me before now.
Here is a list of dignitaries likely found in any library catalog with death dates after 2000:
Ali, Muhammad, 1942-2016.
Angelou, Maya, 1928-2014.
Bergman, Ingmar, 1918-2007.
Bradbury, Ray, 1920-2012.
Buchwald, Art, 1925-2007.
Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 1908-2004.
Clarke, Arthur Charles, 1917-2008.
Cronkite, Walter, 1916-2009.
Cuomo, Mario Matthew, 1932-2015.
Doctorow, E. L., 1931-2015.
Ephron, Nora, 1941-2012.
Farmer, Philip Jos, 1918-2009.
Ferraro, Geraldine, 1935-2011.
Fowles, John, 1926-2005.
Gorey, Edward, 1925-2000.
Haig, Alexander Meigs, 1924-2010.
Heyerdahl, Thor, 1914-2002.
John Paul II, Pope, 1920-2005.
Kael, Pauline, 1919-2001.
Kerr, Jean, 1922-2003.
Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, 1926-2004.
Lee, Harper, 1926-2016.
Lem, Stanisaw, 1921-2006.
L’Engle, Madeleine, 1918-2007.
Lessing, Doris May, 1919-2013.
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1908-2009.
Lindgren, Astrid, 1907-2002.
Mailer, Norman, 1923-2007.
Makeba, Miriam, 1932-2008.
Mandelbrot, Benoit B, 1924-2010.
McNamara, Robert S., 1916-2009.
Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005.
Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.
Nozick, Robert, 1938-2002.
Rampal, Jean Pierre, 1922-2000.
Reagan, Ronald, 1911-2004.
Rohmer, Eric, 1920-2010.
Sacks, Oliver W, 1933-2015.
Sagan, Francoise, 1935-2004.
Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-2010
Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, 1917-2007.
Sheldon, Sidney, 1917-2007.
Spark, Muriel, 1918-2006.
Terkel, Studs, 1912-2008.
Thatcher, Margaret, 1925-2013.
Updike, John, 1932-2009.
Vonnegut, Kurt, 1922-2007
Weinberger, Caspar W, 1917-2006.
Wiesel, Elie, 1928-2016.
Zinn, Howard, 1922-2010.
Reagan was just the tip of the iceberg for authors that had no date information in their official records. Here is my list of 50 or so authors who (to the best of my knowledge) had no dates associated with their lives:
Adams, Douglas, 1952-2001.
Amis, Kingsley, 1922-1995.
Angelou, Maya, 1928-2014.
Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975.
Auchincloss, Louis, 1917-2010.
Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989.
Behan, Brendan, 1923-1964.
Bellow, Saul, 1915-2005.
Bourjaily, Vance Nye, 1922-2010.
Brown, Dee Alexander, 1908-2002.
Calisher, Hortense, 1911-2009.
Calvino, Italo, 1923-1985.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 1908-2004.
Cheever, John, 1912-1982.
Cousins, Norman, 1912-1990.
Davies, Robertson, 1913-1995.
De Regniers, Beatrice Schenk, 1914-2000.
Dickey, James, 1923-1997.
Durant, Ariel, 1898-1981.
Durrell, Lawrence, 1912-1990.
Dyer, Wayne W, 1940-2015.
Eco, Umberto, 1932-2016.
Fallaci, Oriana, 1929-2006.
Fellini, Federico, 1920-1993.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 1919-
Feynman, Richard Phillips, 1918-1988.
Foote, Shelby, 1916-2005.
Frankl, Viktor Emil, 1905-1997.
Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997.
Graham, Sheilah, 1904-1988.
Herriot, James, 1916-1995.
Hurston, Zora Neale, 1891-1960.
Inge, William, 1913-1973.
Ionesco, Eugne, 1909-1984.
Kroeber, Theodora, 1897-1979.
Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920-1996.
Lee, Harper, 1926-2016.
LeShan, Eda J, 1922-2002.
Levi, Primo, 1919-1987.
Malamud, Bernard, 1914-1986.
Mandelbrot, Benoit B, 1924-2010.
Mowat, Farley, 1921-2014.
Norton, Mary, 1903-1992.
O’Connor, Flannery, 1925-1964.
Paley, Grace, 1922-2007.
Peter, Laurence J, 1919-1990.
Plath, Sylvia, 1932-1963.
Pohl, Frederik, 1919-2013.
Rand, Ayn, 1905-1982.
Renault, Mary, 1905-1983.
Silverstein, Shel, 1930-1999.
Sorensen, Theodore C, 1928-2010.
Spark, Muriel, 1918-2006.
Susann, Jacqueline, 1918-1974.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 1881-1955.
Toynbee, Philip, 1916-1981.
Trapp, Maria Augusta, 1905-1987.
Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim, 1912-1989.
Turabian, Kate L, 1893-1987.
Van der Post, Laurens, 1906-1996.
West, Jessamyn, 1902-1984.
Wilson, August, 1945-2005.
Winsor, Kathleen, 1919-2003.
Zemach, Harve, 1933-1974.