2 Authors, 1 Name

[Lithia]

There are two authors by the same name (Beverly Lewis), one who writes golf books and one who writes Christian fiction. How do I separate them and more importantly, what should each be named to differentiate.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

I believe the current way to do it is to change the name of one of them by adding an extra space between the first and last names. If you manually change the name for each book of one of the authors (choose the author with fewer books) the system will recognize them as different, although the names will still be display the same way since web browsers automatically strips extra spaces out of html.

[Lithia]

Thanks!

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

When possible, one can use middle initials or full middle names. My guess is that eventually they'll have to assign numbers the way IMDB does, so Ian Flemming (1), Ian Flemming (2), etc..., but maybe someone will have a more clever idea. Something like birth year might make it mildly more obvious which author each one is (as well as being slightly educational), but that's not guaranteed to be unique.

[Kristen]

I'm finding a handful of duplicate names where a middle initial is not available for any of them (via Library of Congress), but birth years are. Putting just a birth year in the author record forces a default Jan 01, which I'm avoiding as inaccurate. Is including birth year after the name, like in a library catalog, an actual endorsed way to go? Thanks.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

I do not believe including the birth year is currently endorsed, I had just thrown it out there as a possible mechanism. Adding it now will just confuse the system with respect to the actual name. If you put "John Doe (1957)" as the name, the system would think the last name was "(1957)". Other than using extra spaces, I think we may just have to wait for the power-that-be to come up with a better DB system.

I'm sort disappointed with the fact that you can't enter a birth year for an author without a month/day, but it's a fairly obvious DB issue which would be hard to avoid.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Wikipedia often has complete birth dates, although this is obviously less likely (and less likely to be accurate) for more obscure authors.

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

How do you decide if what you're seeing is two different authors with one name? Right now I'm guessing that the Carol Cox who writes romance novels is not the Carol Cox who wrote a book about nursing assessment. I do like to have some sort of outside confirmation of my guesses.

[jenjn79]

JG - You're probably right that they are different people, but you're best bet might be to see if the author has a website and then look for a booklist. That should give you a good idea of what she's claiming authorship of.

EDIT: I found a list of her books on her website:
http://www.carolcoxbooks.com/books.htm

Hope that helps :)

[jenjn79]

Elizabeth...I don't know if she's in fact a third Kate, but if she is, yes adding a 3rd space will separate her out.