Familial authorship in the Anglo-American cataloging tradition

In the light of a proposal for names of families to be treated as a separate form of name heading in the forthcoming Resource Description and Access, this article examines the treatment of families in the Anglo-American descriptive cataloging tradition and the extent to which names of families have been assigned as non-subject access points. It contrasts manuscript catalogers' practice of assigning family name headings with the general binary division of personal and corporate names, and discusses how an expansion of the library definition of authorship, so as to accommodate the archival concept of provenance, may more readily allow for familial and other non-corporate group authors. It concludes by suggesting that a corporate and non-corporate group categorisation may be unnecessary, and that instead the corporate body class should be revised, so as to encompass all groups of persons.