The contributors to this paper give an interesting presentation on authorship, catalog systems, and intellectual property.

Our concept of authorship dates back to ancient times, when the Greeks divided authors into classes (by subject), provided biographical information about the author, and cited all of the author’s works. Similarly, the Chinese identified an author, his lifetime, hometown, career in government, and other achievements.

Smiraglia et al. observe that the concept of a catalog of books or a library catalog is linked to the invention of book selling. They also mention that the concept of intellectual property emerged with book selling and book publication. Before the printing press, patrons funded authors.

The contributors point out that,

On the one hand, the Anglo-American obsession with the identification of authorship receives more reinforcement through the articulation of author roles and the new provision of having multiple authors (i.e., creators) as the lead component of the preferred access point for a work. On the other hand, the new terminology and the structural relegation of authorship rules in relation to identification of works point to an opposite direction.

They conclude with this observation: “It is possible that we are returning to our roots in the author as a person with attributes of their own relationships to works at the same time that we are removing the name ‘author’ from our official parlance.”