Not THAT Thomas More

Last fall, an intern alerted the Technical Services Department to a problem in one of Rubenstein Library’s archival catalog records: “The catalog record for the Thomas Moore Papers lists ‘More, Thomas, -1685’ as the author. The author’s last name should be spelled “Moore” (with two Os), and his date of death, though unclear, was almost certainly after 1817, which is when the letters in the collection were addressed to him.”

A screenshot of the original catalog record, with “More, Thomas, -1685” as creator.

Nerd alert: This is my favorite kind of library mix-up. This was an old-style catalog record, where the title was just “Papers,” and as our intern pointed out, it said that the collection’s creator was “More, Thomas, -1685.” To confirm: No, it’s not THAT Thomas More.

How does this sort of mis-attribution make its way into the catalog? My best guess is that this was a technical error by an authority service vendor, which probably happened years ago but was only just now caught. As our intern pointed out, the date of the collection is centuries after 1685; plus the name was spelled differently. I investigated and found that our own legacy description (the card catalog, dating from 1958) has Thomas Moore, spelled correctly, but at some point between 1989 and 2023, our online catalog’s entry for Thomas Moore got matched and merged with an authority record for Thomas More, d. 1685. In this case, it is a pretty obvious mistake. It also amused me that both Thomas Mores share their name with an even more famous St. Thomas More (1478-1535), Renaissance humanist and author of Utopia. But, it’s not always this obvious that there’s a problem. More and more frequently, common creator names are getting mismatched and merged by AI or other automation tools, which are often unable to reliably disambiguate names—and so, will often assume and act as if all Thomas Mores/Thomas Moores are the same person.

Letter in the collection addressed to Mr. Thomas Moore of Baltimore

Errors like these serve to underline the important role of professional catalogers in the creation and maintenance of our collections’ metadata. Determining a creator’s identity, and distinguishing between identities, is a fundamental component of technical services librarianship. It can be very tricky to dig up information about historically obscure creators of manuscript collections—especially for a name as common as Thomas Moore. In Rubenstein Library Technical Services, we prioritize name authority work as part of our broader inclusive description program. By researching and establishing name authority records for the individuals and organizations documented in our collections, we expand access and discovery of materials from historically under-described communities and groups. Name authority records are shared across libraries, allowing for cooperative cataloging among different repositories. The Library of Congress Name Authority File is a dataset full of Thomas Mores and Thomas Moores — all contributed by different libraries in order to clarify which Thomas was the Thomas More who authored or created the specific work they have in their collection. By participating in this process, we make it easier for researchers to find connections between our holdings and other libraries’ collections, and we expand the existing name authority file by adding important access points and information to help disambiguate between similar names.

Rubenstein’s 19th century Thomas Moore was hard to pin down—the letters addressed to him in the collection indicated that he lived in Baltimore in 1817. I took a look through the letters and confirmed he worked as a watchmaker and was an Irish immigrant. There were way too many Thomas Moores in online immigration and naturalization logs for me to to be certain of a birth, death, or naturalization date. But, as I researched, I was able to determine that the RL’s Thomas Moore is also documented in the papers of the Moore and Gillespie family of South Carolina, held at University of South Carolina. His era of activity (early 19th century), his location (Baltimore), his country of origin (Ireland), and his profession (watchmaker) were enough for me to disambiguate the RL’s Thomas Moore from the dozens of other Thomas Mores and Moores that were already established as names in the Library of Congress Name Authority File. So, along with updating our collection’s catalog record, I was able to contribute a new authority record just for him. Problem solved! Going forward, our library and any other library holding more (Moore?) of his papers will be able to link to the right Thomas Moore, from the right century.