Personal Names

Personal names are included as they are mentioned in printed books irrespective of their role in creating the work’s intellectual or artistic content. Exceptionally this type of record may refer to a group of individuals (e.g. brothers or a family), as long as they are not to be classed as Imprint names. Content

• The first set of records for standard forms of personal names to be included in the CERL Thesaurus was made available to CERL by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, in 2001.
• The British Library offered their listings of standard forms of personal and corporate names in the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) for inclusion in the CERL Thesaurus.
• Further personal names were derived from the see-/see also- references in the Verzeichnis deutscher Drucke des 16. Jh. (VD16), the retrospective German national bibliography for books published between 1501 and 1600.
• Warsaw University Library offered authority records connected with the bibliographical records that are held in the Hand Press Book Database.
• The largest contribution is the German national authority file for personal name headings, the Personennamendatei (PND) of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The CERL Thesaurus contains those records that refer to persons who died before 1851; the records are regularly updated.

The most up-to-date information on the CERL Thesaurus contents may be found here.

1. Forms used as entry forms by one of the contributing libraries are indexed as they are, without any further additions etc. For example:

      1	ribalta, francisco

2. Variant or fictional name forms are followed by an equals sign and the first (in alphabetical order) heading form. For example:

      1	ribadeneira, petrus = ribadeneyra, pedro

3. A name form comprising non-sorting elements will be indexed (a) without the non-sorting elements, (b) with the non-sorting elements as a part of the first name and © with the non-sorting elements as a part of the last name. For example:

      1	bergen, paulus
      1	bergen, paulus von
      1	von bergen, paulus

4. Names containing additons (filing qualifiers) are indexed with the addition following the name and without. For example:

      1	parker, matthew archbishop of canterbury
      2	parker, matthew

5. Names that consist only of a single name form (i.e. the first name) and an addition to the name or a filing qualifier will be indexed with and without the addition and - unless the addition contains a numeration of any kind - with the addition in the place of the last name. For example:

      >100 johannes
         2 johannes damascenus
         1 damascenus, johannes

Please see also the general rules concerning the treatment of characters in indexing.