Ottoman Authors Revisited: Name Authority Records at the BnF

Abstract

Despite the proposals developed by Birnbaum in 1968, rules and practices to establish authority records for Ottoman authors have gaps and / or are still not completely implemented. The diversity of ways in which reference is made to these authors, the lack ofpatronyms in the sense of a hereditary family name, the range of given names among Ottoman Muslims leading to many homonyms, all add to the confusion of people and their works. If we add to this the question of changing alphabets, of calendars and that of “nationality” as we understand it today, the challenges only increase.

The online cataloguing of manuscripts in 2010 triggered the Turkish office of the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) to come up, once again, with some recommendations on the subject. If we expect thereby to ac­hieve some resolutions via these recommendations, we hope to do so after having sparked a debate among the community of colleagues in Turkey and elsewhere. The aim being to establish a reliable and coherent Ottoman and Turkish name authority file.