Recording gender in the person entity: an ongoing discussion

Abstract

The discussion on the gender registration of person-type entities (agents) is part of the broader context of new approaches to bibliographic cataloguing proposed by libraries' adoption of web technologies and languages. Cataloguing is increasingly becoming an activity of identifying and describing entities, with their multiple faces, or even through the different points of view from which that entity can be observed (entity modelling). Identifying the boundary of an entity and the different profiles with which it can present itself to the world becomes one of the most complex and significant moments in the new way of cataloguing resources. The profile of a person-type entity is traced by identifying its characteristics and extending the investigation to relations with other entities. The reflection on the effectiveness of intrinsic properties and extrinsic or relational properties in identifying an entity introduces the topic of the registration of the property relating to the gender of a person, a topic widely discussed in the library and web community. The study analyses the positions taken on this issue by two communities active in the cataloguing field, the PCC Ad Hoc Task Group on Gender in Authority Records and the ISNI International Agency, with references also to the positions expressed on the same issue by the Wikidata community.