multiple authors but single author entry

[Peter]

Murder at the President's Door is shown as being by author William Harrington Elliott Roosevelt. The title page actually reads Elliott Roosevelt's Murder at the President's Door with the author listed as by William Harrington for the Estate of Elliott Roosevelt .

I have several questions. The most important:
1. Is splicing 2 author names together into a single name an accepted practice on GR?
2. If these authors should be split, who should be the primary author?
And a side issue:
3. Under what conditions should the title be corrected?

[Lobstergirl]

1. No
2. From the MacMillan site, it looks like Elliott Roosevelt is the primary author. Barnes & Noble also lists him first, and Harrington second.
3. Are you asking if the title should be Elliott Roosevelt's Murder at the President's Door, rather than Murder at the President's Door? Both sites I looked at indicate the second title.

http://us.macmillan.com/Book.aspx?isb...

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Murd...

Other editions list Roosevelt as primary author:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...

[Peter]

Lobstergirl,

re 2: Elliott Roosevelt is deceased. This work is similar to Eric Van Lustbader writing the later Bourne books. If you go to http://us.macmillan.com/author/elliot... and compare the covers of the members of the Eleanor Roosevelt Mystery series, you will see that the covers change between #18 and #19 from "Elliott Roosevelt" (author) to "Elliott Roosevelt's" (creator).

re 2 and3: LOC record (http://lccn.loc.gov/2001041978) shows the title as Elliott Roosevelt’s Murder at the president’s door : an Eleanor Roosevelt mystery and the author as Harrington, William, 1931- . It seems to me that all of the other copies should be updated as well.

For GR, who is the ultimate authority, the publisher or the Library of Congress?

[Carolyn]

I'd say we generally value LOC data over the publisher data, but since GR has some tweaks in displaying data that LOC doesn't, we follow GR policy overall.

For deceased authors whose series is continued by other authors, we would put the real author in the #1 position and the original author of the series in the #2 author position, with the role of "Series Creator".

So, in this particular case, I'd show it as:

Murder at the President's Door
William Harrington
Elliott Roosevelt (Series Creator)

-and make sure to add it to the series for the Eleanor Roosevelt mysteries (or create one, if there isn't one already.)

This way the book page accurately reflects and ties to all the information needed.

ETA: Oh, and you can certainly go in and correct the title of each edition as well.

[Peter]

Carolyn wrote: "I'd say we generally value LOC data over the publisher data, but since GR has some tweaks in displaying data that LOC doesn't, we follow GR policy overall.

For deceased authors whose series is c..."

Thank you very much for the clarification. That's how I thought it should be, but I wasn't entirely sure what GR's position and policy was.