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Library of Congress Name Authority
REFERENCE WORK
Authority records maintained by the Library of Congress for the purpose of identifying authors and subjects, as well as other people associated with a work. The intent is that an authority record be strong, but unfortunately many are "undifferentiated" -- multiple people with the same name are conflated into a single record. Likewise, a person might have two separate authority records (perhaps under different names) which might be merged at some point. To further complicate matters, there are cases where the maintainers seem to desire multiple records for a single individual: Mark Twain has a separate entry under Samuel Clemens. Such entries seem to be rare and inconsistently created.
Over time, NNDB is attempting to correlate as many of our profiles with LOC Name Authority records as possible. Even though this is accomplished by manual examination to ensure as few errors as possible, sometimes the underlying data will change. For instance, we might inadvertently link to an undifferentiated record. There are also cases where we cannot correlate anything, because the only record available has obvious undifferentiation.
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