Briefly summarize the main points of the required readings for Week Ten (Billey, Drabinski, &

Roberto; Fox & Swickard) and the ethical issues you think need to be taken into consideration in
personal name authority work. What are some of the challenges associated with describing people
when cataloging? In your opinion, is it possible to have a good balance between a person’s right to
privacy/self-identification and a library user’s ability to find resources associated with that person?
Please cite each article in your post and don't forget to respond to a classmate's post as well.

“What’s Gender got to do with it?” (Billey et al., 2014) is an argument against including the gender field
in authority records. Specifically, the cataloger must assume the gender of the author as
unchanging/unchangeable and that there are only the options of male, female, or undetermined which
is “passively hostile to transgender individuals” (p. 414).

I can see both sides of this argument. Obviously, if the author is uncomfortable then not including 375
makes sense. However, the 375 field can help identify authors for a patron who cannot remember an
author’s name but remembers that she is a woman in her 30s who writes mysteries. The information
could also be useful for verifying the correct authority record for an author. I personally have not had to
conduct these searches, but I could see it coming up. The issue with adding more than the binary
options is not necessarily knowing how a person wants to be perceived. Should we add trans man, trans
woman, gender fluid, etc.? These would help with identity but could cause their own problems with how
an author prefers to be seen as is described on pages 417-419 of the article.

“My Zine is my Private Life” (Fox & Swickard) discusses privacy issues associated with non-traditional art,
such as zines or graffiti, and pseudonyms being included in cataloging. RDA currently directs that if an
individual’s real name is known to include it in the record as a variant name even if the real name is
never used by the author (p. 15). This does not acknowledge privacy concerns of the individual who
might not want a dead name or pseudonym attached to a work or their authority control record (p. 16).
I like their idea of more transparency in Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) so authors can
easily obtain their authority record and dispute anything erroneous (p. 17).

The ethics of care approach Fox and Swickard suggest seems to be an obvious choice that would help in
both situations of gender and pseudonyms, verifying with the artist/author before including if possible
and having NACO more useable to the public for corrections. A challenge I can foresee with asking an
artist would be not having their contact information or not receiving a response, in which case there
would need to be guidelines in place for further steps and when to use catalogers’ judgment instead to
finish the record.

As for zines and street art, is it assumed that this collection is part of a library? I am having trouble
thinking of which instances would drive a cataloger to include these into an authority record but there
are a lot of different types of librarians I am not familiar with, possibly a street art museum?

Billey, A., Drabinski, E., & Roberto, K. R. (2014). What’s gender got to do with it? : A critique of RDA 9.7.
Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 52(4), 412–421. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2014.882465

Fox, V.B., & Swickard, K. (2019). My zine life is my private life : Reframing authority control from
detective work to an ethics of care. In J. Sandberg (ed.). Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control.
(pp. 9-23) Library Juice Press.