[Metadatalibrarians] separating first and last names

[Stacy Wile]

I have developed a metadata schema for my company, which publishes reprints of articles and book chapters for instructors. The metadata describes each of these selections. I created separate fields for the first and last names of the authors, but in surveying existing metadata standards, it seems that they all define a single field for personal names. I created separate fields to facilitate searching and sorting, so that the software would not have to extract the last name in real time. Can anyone tell me why single fields are so much more common?