[Dspace-general] Name Authority

[Hutchinson, Alvin]

Two questions regarding name authority:

Some scholars believe that a name listed in a bibliographic entry should
be entered exactly as it appears on the publication. So if I published
two papers and one paper lists me as Hutchinson, Alvin and another lists
me as Hutchinson, A.R. then my DSpace entries would reflect this and
there would be two entries for the same person.

However I feel like consistent retrieval of items by a particular author
requires consistent naming. Any thoughts on this? Do you think any of
the contributors to your repositories have a problem with normalizing or
standardizing their name regardless of how it appears on the article
they've published?


Also, does anyone have any scripts or codes (or advice) for replacing
creator names in the dcvalue table of the DSpace database? I would
imagine that an sql script along the lines of:

"update dcvalue set text_value=Hutchinson, Alvin R. where
text_value=Hutchinson, A.R."

would be an adequate routine to standardize the name. 

But there is an itemsbyauthor table that may need updating. Are there
any other tables or data that would also need to be updated in the
database? I think I tried something like the script above once on a test
server but it didn't work out for some reason.

I may post the second part of this question to the Dspace-Tech list as
well since it may be more appropriate there, but I thought that as long
as I had your attention . . . .

Any advice appreciated.

Alvin Hutchinson
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
(202) 633-1031