Conventions used in LACBD Personal Names Authority List

Structural conventions

The LACBD Personal Names Authority List groups personal names found in the Nunis and Rudd indexes.  The Subject Category Display section of this document lists the personal names within their classes.  The category “unclassified names” is a place holder for personal names of people who do not fit into one of the established categories.  The Alphabetical  Display section lists the personal names alphabetically, showing preferred name forms and their alternate forms when present.

The LACBD Personal Names Authority List was constructed using the Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Thesauri (Bethesda, MD:  National Information Standards Organization, ANSI/NISO Z39.19-1993, 30 August 1993).

Naming conventions

The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition, Chapter 22 was used as the standard for establishing personal names.  The general rule 22.1.a, “In general, choose, as the basis of the heading for a person, the name by which he or she is commonly known” governed decisions between name variants from the Nunis and Rudd indexes and research resources.

Thesaurus display fields

Relationships (RT) between personal names are currently not exhaustive.  There are three general reasons for the RT relationship.
Two or more people are

• from the same family
• business partners
• friends or adversaries

Scope Notes contain a brief description of the person’s occupation or reason for renown.

Date gives birth and death dates when available.  If the death date alone is known, it is preceded by a “d.”  If the death date is unknown, the birth date is followed by “??”

Source Vocabulary may be derived from the following:

 Nunis – Nunis bibliography
 Rudd –Rudd bibliography
 LAPL – from Los Angeles Public Library “Electronic Neighborhood”
 Syn – synthesized from research resources

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