Article Response for Lecture 6 - Emanuel

Emanuel, M. (2011). A fistful of headings: Name authority control for video recordings. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 49(6), 484-99.

This article enumerates some of the many difficulties in authorship, using examples from the seemingly incongruous MARC designations for spirit communications. Spirit mediums, around the mid-1800s, began purporting contact with potential authors, and indeed publishing books under their own names and the names of the spirits they said to have contacted.  Such works lead to difficulties in attribution of responsibility.  Is the medium responsible for the work, or is it the supposed author? If it is the purported author, how much of the work is collaborative, and thus complex in attribution?

            Without initial guidance for these specific cases in the rulebook, many catalogers used the rules for interviews to categorize attribution of medium-interpreted works.  The medium functioned as the interviewer, and the spirit as an interviewee, and attribution was based on the amount of intellectual content contributed by either party. This led to works being attributed to Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) after his death, with only a side note for the contribution of the medium. Copyright protections, then, became a major issue. Some effort was made to classify spirits as supposed or presumed authors, rather than official authors, but such rules didn’t apply to interviews, so inconsistencies abounded.

            Revisions of the cataloging rules to incorporate medium-written works cleared up some of the copyright issue, by only allowing the medium to be considered the main author, and the deceased to be a side note. However, difficulties still arose in authority control, since the name-data depicting Mark Twain’s ghost was the same as the name-data depicting Mark Twain, and the changes in rules mid-stream, led to some conflicting entries, as older entries were written with different attributions. Is the supposed spirit of Mark Twain really Mark Twain?

            Eventually three distinct systems emerged for categorizing authorship of spirit communications.

Spirit communications in which the spirits were established historical figures–like Parker and Hale–entailed main entry under the medium and added entry under the historical figure. Spirit communications in which the spirits were prolific, well-known, but not of proven historical existence–like Worth–entailed main entry under the spirit, with qualifier added to the heading. Spirit communications in which the spirit was either not prolific–like Grayland and Pheneas–of unknown origin–like Ka-Ra-Om–or in debate–like Twain–entailed entry only for the medium.

            When Lubetzky stepped in to simplify and codify the rules, he standardized and enumerated the concept of spirit attribution. A work “attributed to the spirit of another person, is entered under the person who prepared it, with an added entry under the person to whom it is attributed.” This speaks directly to social construction, as during the time when attribution to the spirit itself was prevalent, was a time in which spiritualism was popular and accepted as truth, whereas in Lubetzky’s time it had fallen out of favor.

            However, the definition of spirit communication as an interviewer and interviewee relationship persisted, with the caveat that the spirit was a supposed author, and not simply attributed as author until the AACR2, which gave spirit communication its own subheading, with primacy given to the spirit itself. This is because of a shift in philosophy, toward neutrality in cataloging.  Catalogers were instructed not to judge topical issues, like whether the ghost of Mark Twain really is Mark Twain, but simply perform attribution, and leave the scholars to decide.  The catalog is, after all a search method, and if one needs the spirit writings of Mark Twain, one is likely to search under Mark Twain.

            There is a distinct tug of war here, between the objectives of collocating everything by a given author, in which case spirit communication can be misattribution, and the defining of authorship at face value, without bias. To avoid misattribution, currently the qualifier of (Spirit) is added to main entry names of spirits, to distinguish them from their living versions, distinguishing between biographical personhood, and bibliographical personhood, like a surrogate record for authorship.