Undifferentiated Personal Name Authority Records (Additions and Changes to Authority Records)
Sometimes a personal name heading being created will conflict with or normalize to match another heading in the NAF. Normalization refers to a computer edit that eliminates all diacritics and most punctuation (except first comma after subfield a), and converts all letters to uppercase and all modified letters to their unmodified equivalents. (See DCM Z1, Introduction, p.4-6, for more information and examples.)
If neither heading can be modified to differentiate it from the other, an authority record representing more than one person with the same name will need to be created. These are called undifferentiated personal name authority records (also called non-unique name authority records).
From April 1988-mid-June 1990, the LC policy was to list up to three persons represented by the name in the authority record. If the heading represented four or more people, the record retained information on three persons and included a 667 note "Record covers additional persons."
In June 1990 LC decided to abandon the limit of three persons (reverting to earlier practice) and to allow undifferentiated personal name records to list all people represented by the heading, without regard to the number of people using that name. Although the note "Records covers additional persons" has been discontinued for new records, it should be retained when found on existing records.
Procedure:
1. If the heading being created will exactly match or will normalize to exactly match another heading in the NAF, examine the heading to see if it is for a differentiated personal name (Undifferentiated personal name fixed field 008/32 = a) or for an undifferentiated personal name (Undifferentiated personal name fixed field 008/32 = b). If it is the latter, skip to section IV below.
2. If the authority record is for a differentiated personal name, try to resolve the conflict for either the heading being created or the heading already in the NAF. See AACR2 22.17-19 and consult appropriate reference sources to do so.
3. If the conflict cannot be resolved, it will be necessary to change the existing NAF record into a heading for an undifferentiated personal name, per AACR2 22.20 and DCM Z1.
A. Change the Undifferentiated personal name fixed field to b.
B. For each person represented by the NAR, supply two 670 citations for the name on the work in hand. The first will contain an informal dexcriptive term for the person, consisting of the title of the work cataloged and the person’s relationship to it, and will be in brackets. The second will be a standard 670 note.
C. List the reference sources consulted in trying to break the conflict in the 670 or 675 (sources not found) field as appropriate.
D. Add a bracketed 670 field for the first person already listed in the authority record, per step III. B. above. This will be the first 670 field for that person.
4. If the NAF record being changed is already coded as an undifferentiated personal name (Undifferentiated personal name fixed field 008/32 = b), add the citations to the record, following steps III B-C above.
See also:
Section II - Additons and Changes to Authority Records
