BUG: Some author names are not put correctly into "Last, First" order

Thanks, Rosie. It looks like these are just cases where the "Author" metadata field wasn't entered in Last, First format, so that'll need to be updated. Could you give me the list of what the resources are? A little easier than trying to look them all up by author name.

I've sent a link to this thread to our Content Production team.

Rosie Perera said:

Sure.

A. Cleveland Cox - turned out this was a PB and I'd put the author's name in wrong myself. Fixed.

Philipp Melanchthon - ditto. 

Saint Bonaventure - ditto. 

The others are:

Abdullah Yusuf Ali. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an. Author should be Ali, Abdullah Yusuf.

Saint Patrick. The Confession of St. Patrick with an Introduction and Notes. Author should be Patrick, Saint.

Saint Patrick and Olden, Thomas. The Confession of St. Patrick with an Introduction and Notes. Patrick should be listed as Patrick, Saint.

For the Roman authors, I'm not positive which of their names they are most known by but I'm pretty sure Julius Caesar should be under Julius, and someone more familiar with history or classical literature would have to decide about the other two. Wikipedia has Gaius Valerius Catullus as "Catullus" and Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus as "Suetonius". So there doesn't seem to be a consistent rule of first or last.

C. Julius Caesar. Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars.

C. Julius Caesar. The Civil Wars

C. Julius Caesar. Commentarii De Bello Gallico

C. Julius Caesar. The Gallic War

C. Julius Caesar. Gallic War (English)

C. Suetonius Tranquillus. The Lives of the Caesars (English)

C. Valerius Catullus and Burton, Richard Francis. Carmina (English)

C. Valerius Catullus and Smithers, Leonard C. Carmina (English)

Okay, so our Content Production team fixed the easy ones, and sent me the "short version" of the explanation for the ones they aren't changing. It's still a pretty lengthy explanation that I can't summarize well, so I'll just copy it over...

I’ve fixed a few of these, but the formatting of the Roman names and of Saint Patrick is intentional. The short explanation for each is:

Ancient names don’t usually get reversed in our system. That’s so we don’t have to guess at what constitutes a “first” or “last” name in a culture with different conventions. “Julius”, for example, isn’t Julius Caesar’s first name. If I’m understanding this right, his first name was Caius/Gaius, which is what the “C.” in the current listing stands for. “C. Julius Caesar” is actually the fullest version of his name present on the title page of any book in our library, which is why I picked it as the current standard. It’s searchable by any permutation of his name represented in our catalogue (Well… in English, anyway. Latin spelling is more variable).

It’s also because the software recognizes the comma and thinks it knows how to rearrange the names. If you aren’t careful about how you input the name, you can get very messy (and potentially hilarious ) results. This especially happens in bibliographic citations. For complicated ancient names, it really is simpler to add them in as one “lump” name with no commas. That gives the software no way to scramble them.

“Saint Patrick” is just a sticky special case. I don’t want to capture his name as “Patrick, Saint” because the software would believe that “Saint” is his first name. Removing the “Saint” would make his name ambiguous in a way that isn’t an issue for, say, Saint Bonaventure. I could capture his name as “Patrick of Ireland”, but the name “Saint Patrick” is so widely culturally ingrained I’m not sure that would be a useful substitution. For now, I’m sticking with it as it is.

In general, though, I really prefer the “Last name, First name” format for library systems. Knowing where the last name begins and ends is a useful piece of information, given that many people have two-word last names, or multiple middle names, or compound first names. You can reverse engineer one system way more easily than the other.