Unit 10 Personal Authors (Western and Indic Names)
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Personal Authors (Western and Indic Names) UNIT 10 PERSONAL AUTHORS (WESTERN AND INDIC NAMES) Structure 10.0 Objectives 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Author Catalogue 10.2.1 Author Approach 10.2.2 Authorship 10.2.3 Choice of Heading 10.2.4 Form of Heading 10.3 Rules for Choice of Heading 10.3.1 AACR-2R 10.3.2 CCC 10.4 Rules for Form of Heading 10.4.1 AACR-2R 10.4.2 CCC 10.4.3 Other Indic Names: Muslim Names 10.5 Summary 10.6 Answers to Self Check Exercises 10.7 Key Words 10.8 References and Further Reading 10.0 OBJECTIVES You have learnt, in Block 2, the different areas of catalogue entries for different types of documents, their sequence in presenting information and the different ways of filing of entries in a dictionary and a classified catalogue. In this Unit, you are introduced to the composition of the heading which carries the name of the author of a document. This involves the choice and rendering of an author's name. We are confined to personal names here. After reading this Unit, you will be able to: • describe the functions of an author catalogue; • explain the concept of authorship; • distinguish the two basic skills required in cataloguing, 'i.e., to choose and to render the heading for a personal author; and • get an insight into the purpose of cataloguing and various customary usages for rendering Western and Indic names as standardised in AACR-2R and CCC. 10.1 INTRODUCTION Author catalogue, in spite of the current popularity of subject approach to information, has remained the most used bibliographic tool in all types of libraries. Building a strong author catalogue is the primary function of a catalogue. For turning out an effective catalogue capable of Ideating and correctly identifying every author whose literary output is held in the library collection, it is first necessary to know the function of author catalogue and the concept of authorship as it is understood in library cataloguing. Equally important is to know what constitutes heading in a catalogue and what purpose it serves. Basically then, there are two skills a cataloguer must acquire; (i) to choose from the bibliographic data available on the title page of a book, the name of the person who 5 can be identified as the Choice and Rendering of Heading and Cataloguing of author of the item, and (ii) to render that name into an appropriate heading in a manner Non-Print Media most likely to coincide with the approach of majority of catalogue users. The understanding of authorship will enable the cataloguer to choose the right name as the basis for heading and his acquaintance with customary usages of identifying. Personal names in different Western and Indian communities will enable him to render his choice into the most appropriate form. All this again is to be done, on the basis of cataloguing rules that are widely followed in libraries. This unit defines and discusses different problems concerning the 'choice and form of personal names for building author catalogues. 10.2 AUTHOR CATALOGUE As a student of library science, you can now appreciate that librarianship is basically concerned with creating systematic records of bibliographical items. Each record that a librarian creates is expected to provide access to a source of information like a book or an article from a journal or some other document. We may refer to it as a `bibliographic record'. It is possible to collect these bibliographic records into different sets according to the function each set performs. One such set of records, for example, may be used as a finding list, otherwise known as a library catalogue. A library catalogue consists of records or entries, each of which cites a book. There are several ways of citing a book. In other words, there are several kinds of entries for a book, as you must have learnt while studying Unit 5 of the present course. One way of recording a book in a catalogue is to enter it under the name of its author. Additionally, a book may be entered under its title as also under the subject of its content. A cataloguer thus presumes that a library user has three ways of approaching the collection - author, title, or subject. Here again, the presumption is that the user knows the `author's name or the title. When neither is known, subject approach is helpful. Occasionally a user may want to see if there is any book/ new book published under a series (see Unit 5). 10.2.1 Author Approach Of the three approaches, author approach is most common. There are several reasons for it. The first of these is that the author's name is an easily identifiable element, as it is very clearly stated on the title page of a book. Another reason is that an author is "the person chiefly responsible for the creation of the intellectual or artistic content of a work" (AACR- 2). This gives rise to the concept of intellectual responsibility coming down to use from the historical tradition of scholarship. Initially, libraries and their catalogues were developed for the scholar for whom it was necessary to bring all works of an author at one place and an author catalogue served this purpose very well. The importance of an author at one place and an author catalogue is so much that all codes of cataloguing from 1908 Anglo- American Code to AACR-2 embody mainly rules for author entries. However, as early as 1876, Charles Ammie Cutter showed keen interest in subject cataloguing and developed his remarkable Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue. With the development of science libraries, subject catalogue has been growing in importance. Author catalogue, nevertheless, remains predominant irrespective of the type of library. No wonder then that all printed catalogues of the major libraries of the world are author catalogues, e.g., British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books. 10.2.2 Authorship Having seen the predominance of author catalogue, we need to know what constitutes authorship in the context of cataloguing. It is seen above that AACR-2 regards author as the person chiefly responsible for creating the intellectual content of a book. In other words the author is one who has conceived the ideas expressed in a book and desires to communicate them to others. It is then natural for a scholar and a cataloguer to ascribe a work to its creator. In cataloguing, however, it is not only the principle of intellectual responsibility that operates but one is required to go beyond it. The term `author' is taken in a much broader sense by a cataloguer. For a cataloguer, author is not just a person who writes a book, but also one who is otherwise responsible for the creation of the intellectual or artistic content of a book/work. This explains the existence of entries such as editors' commentators, compilers and translators under `authors'. Although these are not the persons responsible for creating the original work, but they are yet responsible for bringing it out in a particular fowl for the first time. The different version of the original is thus the product of their 6 intellection and therefore they are Personal Authors regarded as authors. Thus, the intellectual or artistic contents of a book may be the (Western and Indic Names) outcome of, the work by a single person or a group of persons or a corporate body. Broadly speaking, authorship can be stated in two ways - personal authors, and corporate bodies responsible for the thought content of a work. In another sense, authorship can be of the following types, - single, shared responsibility and works produced by compilation or under editorial direction. 10.2.3 Choice of Heading In cataloguing, a heading is a name (in an author catalogue) or a term (in a subject catalogue) appearing at the head of an entry and may consist of one or more words or phrases. For a catalogue user, a heading acts as an access point to a source of information or bibliographical item. For example: Flippo, Edwin B Personnel Management Here Flippo, Edwin B. is the heading that provides access to Flippo's book (bibliographical item) called Personnel Management. For a cataloguer a heading is an entry point, meaning the point in a sequence at which the record will find its place in the catalogue. Heading serves as the point of reference for both filing and search. As already said a heading very often consists of several words and the first of these matters more than the others. This first among a string of words forming a heading is known, and referred to, as `entry element'. Personal names as headings can be of two kinds; those which provide direct access to bibliographical items, as in the above case, and others that refer the catalogue user to another entry in the catalogue. For example, Mookherjea see Mukherji This second kind is known as reference entry. In an author catalogue, therefore, all headings will be in the form of names of personal authors, names of corporate bodies will also be there, but that is not the point of discussion at the moment. A cataloguer preparing an author catalogue chooses the author's name as it appears on the title page of a book. Thus, the author's name is the natural choice of a heading in an -author catalogue. 10.2.4 Form of Heading Having made the choice of a heading which, in the context of this Unit, is the personal name, the next step involved in author cataloguing is to render it in such a way as to conform to the customary usage of the linguistic community to which the author belongs.