Full Given Names and Birth Year of Creator

PhDinHistory

I have noticed that some of the book citations I snatched from library catalogs and WorldCat contain the birth year of the author followed by the full given names of the author in parentheses. Here is an example of what Zotero shows for something I probably pulled from WorldCat:

Title: A History of Indian Policy.
Author: Tyler, S. Lyman 1920- (Samuel Lyman)

Zotero is doing a good job of faithfully capturing the citation as it was originally created according to the rules of library cataloging. However, I am not sure why the birth year needs to be located in the creator field for Zotero. Unless I am mistaken, the birth year of the creator will never need to be part of the citation for a footnote or bibliography. I am also wondering why Zotero needs to capture the full given names of creators that appear in parentheses in library catalog records. Should Zotero automatically replace the initials in creator's names and with the corresponding full given name? If not, should Zotero ignore these parenthetical notes about creator names? Will the parentheses still be there when I tell Zotero to create a bibliography or insert a note?

dstillman

Zotero will support creator birth years in a future version to allow for disambiguation of creators with the same name.

As for the birth year and the name in parentheses, the translator just needs to be adjusted (on a case-by-case basis) to strip out extraneous parts.

Provide a sample URL, and I'll create a ticket.

PhDinHistory

Thanks for providing the rationale for including birth years. It makes sense. Still, that sort of disambiguation will be only partially successful. There is not always exact correspondence in Zotero between creator names entered manually by users (like from personal correspondence in manuscript collections) and creator names from secondary sources extracted through translation. Even more tricky would be teaching Zotero to recognize the maiden and married names that belong to the same person.

Here is the WorldCat URL for the book I cited above:

http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org.libproxy.unm.edu/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=fsapp12-43571-fhnxuvkw-jy432p:entitypagenum=3:0:recno=2:resultset=1:format=FI:next=html/record.html:bad=error/badfetch.html:entitytoprecno=2:entitycurrecno=2:numrecs=1