How is “usage” determined in establishing a new personal name heading?
Usage is how an author’s form of name is most “commonly found” or presented in the chief sources of his or her works. The Descriptive Cataloging Manual Z1 supplement to the MARC 21 Authority Format 670 section, p. 6 defines usage as the “literal transcription of a name as it appears in a publication, most commonly transcribed in a bibliographic record in a statement of responsibility.” Therefore, catalogers base new personal name headings on usage found on the chief source of the item being cataloged and/or the “usage” found in subfield $c of the 245 in bibliographic records in the file being searched, i.e., OCLC, the LC database, or others. Note that literal transcriptions may appear elsewhere in a record, e.g., as part of the title proper, in an “at head of title” note, in a quoted note, etc. In deciding whether a transcription is a literal one, care must be taken to insure that the transcription has not been altered in some way by cataloging conventions used at the time the transcri
