[Metadatalibrarians] separating first and last names

[Keith Jenkins]

Dublin Core has a (somewhat dated) note about some name-related issues here:
    http://dublincore.org/documents/name-representation/

Keith


On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Stacy Wile <stacywile at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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?