Rules, Privacy, and Ethics: Challenges in Creating Author Name Change Guidelines

Abstract

People change their names for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, gender transition, change in marital status, and religious conversion. Guidance on the metadata management of author name changes for the myriad resources in a library’s discovery system is elusive and absent. Executing metadata for name changes creates many challenges in a rapidly advancing infrastructure of emerging discovery technologies, aggregators with shared metadata in multiple schemas, and numerous formats in varied platforms. Moreover, it is difficult to find a balanced approach to ethically apply evolving cataloging and name authority control rules to suit the linked data environment. This case study examines an academic library’s process in creating guidance for implementing name changes. The paper reports on the stakeholders involved, resources consulted, dilemmas considered, and decisions made in the development of the library’s author name change guidelines.