Legendary characters

One of the nice features of FictionFinder is the ability to do searches against fictitious characters, such as Robin Hood or Elizabeth Bennet.  Unfortunately MARC-21 doesn't make it easy to pick these names out of bibliographic records.  Robin Hood is normally entered in a topical subject field (650) as Robin Hood (Legendary character), Elizabeth as Bennet, Elizabeth (Fictitious character), also in a 650 field.

In the work we've been doing to create summary pages for everyone in WorldCat we slightly extended our work to include identities such as these.  Imagine our chagrin, however, when we realized that Santa Claus was not being recognized!  The reason for this is that Santa Claus doesn't have a parenthetical after it to indicate what type of subject it is.  A similar problem occurs trying to pick up famous animals (e.g. Secretariat).  Secretariat is easy because (Race horse) follows the name, but many similar names do not have as distinctive a pattern.  Of course some things don't even have an authority record (I couldn't find one for the Easter bunny).

So, I wonder what else we are missing besides Santa?

--Th

Comments

[Jon Gorman]

Couldn't help but wonder, is St. Nicholas there? Santa's certainly an interesting example because of how many cross-references/different names are going to be out there for the same "identity". Heck, I'd wager you'd even want a search for "Jolly Old Elf" to be associated with him, even though his status as an elf is under some debate by scholars ;).

[Thom]

The Santa Claus record has see also's to Christmas, Department store Santas and Saint Nicholas' Day.

The original St. Nicholas is a personal name entered as Nicholas,$c Saint, Bp. of Myra.

--Th

[Justin]

How about Fred Cassidy?

[Thom]

Fred Cassidy is, of course, the main character of Roger Zelazny's often overlooked masterpiece Doorways in the Sand. Unfortunately Fred never achieved 'identity' status in library catalogs, probably because he didn't appear in any other books.
There are better known characters that haven't made it yet either. For instance Warf, of Star Trek fame, hasn't (while Kirk, McCoy, and Spock have and all have authority records).

--Th