About person names
A person name is a linguistic designation used to uniquely or conventionally identify an individual human being within a cultural, legal, or social context.
- A person name designates an individual entity, not a general concept.
- A person name may comprise multiple name components (e.g. given name, family name, patronymic, matronymic, title, suffix), the structure of which is culture- and jurisdiction-dependent.
- A person may be associated with multiple person names over time or across contexts (e.g. legal name, preferred name, pseudonym, stage name).
- Person names may have variants (orthographic, transliterated, abbreviated) that refer to the same individual.
This definition is consistent with ISO 704 and ISO 1087-1 principles, and aligns with name authority and identity management practices used in libraries and research systems.
Distinction or terms from related entities
- Person name vs term: a person name identifies a specific individual; a term designates a general concept.
- Person name vs concept: a person name refers to an instance; a concept is an abstract unit of knowledge.
- Person name vs identifier: a person name is linguistic and human-readable; an identifier (e.g. ORCID, employee ID) is a system-assigned reference.
Person name metadata
- Family name, also known as the last name in western culture
- Name type (e.g., name at birth, married name, legal name)
- Other names, all other names aside from the family name (use Uppercase when denoting a new name, lower case for particles (e.g., von, de)
- Role: Select how you intend to use this concept:
- Preferred: primarily the one to use
- Admitted: a variety of this same terms
- Deprecated: this concept is no long er in use
- Status: Identify the status of adding this concept
- Draft: needs more info
- Under review: by another person
- Approved for use but not yet published
- Published and available
- There is a wide variety of status stages (see also 'Terminology workflow')
- Language: designate which language this concept has been added using (e.g., English)
- Note: add any other information that is relevant (e.g., a guidance note on the use of this concept)
Relationships
Person names can have a range of relationships with other records:
- Relationships with specific records (e.g., concepts, terms, or organization names):
- Select the relationships type and use a shortcut key to tag another term to link them together
- Collections: tags that identify what collection(s) you have used this term in
- Documents: tags that identify what document9s) you have used this term in
Authority & Source
- Authority refers to an organization of group that provided evidence for the use of this term (e.g., judicial, government, published)
- Authority type: select the type of entity that provided authority for this term to exist
- Add the description of the authority or use the shortcut key to select the an existing person or oganization from your terminology data
- Source refers to the external documentary evidence you used for compiling this record
- The title of the reference work that contains this evidence (the work should be in your reference library)
- Use the backslash key and enter the title to link the reference record
- Open the library record for this source by clicking the library icon
- Add a new reference record to your library by clicking the + icon
Adding a list into a document
When writing, a smart list of names can be generated from the terminology records that you have used in your document,
- A smart list will produce a list of all names found in your document across all sections
- See Style Guide / Terminology for editing the format of smart lists
Tips
- Create different collections for easy maintenance, exporting, or sharing
- We do not produce a list of work items, quotes, paraphrase, text blocks or websites as these are generally not required when writing documents.
- You can export any collection in full directly from the collection record
- If a name has been added in multiple places and needs updating, you can do so by editing the record and it will automatically update all instances
- For example, changing a characters name, fixing a typo
- If the name has been altered, add a new record
See also
- Adding a collection of terms
- Exporting a collection of terms
- Annotations / Add terms
- Style Guide / Terminology smart lists