Foucault, the Author, and Intellectual Debt: Capturing the Author-Function Through Attributes, Relationships, and Events in Knowledge Organization Systems

Based on Foucault's exploration of the author-function, the current study investigates knowledge organization systems' (KOS's) treatment of persons who are also authors and the ability to record attributes, relationships and events related to those persons. FRBR and FRAD do well to extend the information in library authority records beyond the personal name as a character string to include attributes of the person, yet aspects of the person as an author and author-function can be enhanced. This paper begins with a discussion of the author-function as identified by Foucault and the complexities of identity that arise. Next, it reviews the Library and Information Science (LIS) literature on authorship and name authorities, then briefly discusses the current library content standard (Resource Description and Access, (RDA)) and the current library encoding standard, (MAchine Readable Cataloging, (MARC)). It then examines four projects making use of person data to enhance the author-function: Europeana, AustLit, The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries, and DBpedia. We conclude that additional attributes, relationships, and events are pivotal to moving toward more Foucault-friendly KOS's in libraries. Concerns with this more robust model of recoding information include the ethics of recording attributes of persons and problems of end-user searching in current systems.