A fine fellow student felt I should post a little more so here goes:
I subscribe to Hasafran the Listserv of the Association of Jewish Libraries. (Sefer is book in Hebrew. A safran is a librarian.) They have dealt with the following issue. Some seforim (books, plural for sefar) are writing by people who want to stay anonymous. Why? Sometimes out of humility ("who am I to write a commentary on the Talmud...) or because they want to avoid getting credit for their work in order to avoid the honor that comes with religious authorship. Another reason for anonymity is when an author takes a radical stance and fears communal disapproval.
On the other hand, the Jewish National Library's cataloguers want to record the name of every author whose book is in their library. Thus they can find cataloguing such books challenging.
I started wondering if other cataloguers ever faced the same problem. Lets talk about the Cold War since my professor, Professor Supernant lived through that. When anti Communist tracts were snuck out of the Soviet Union, did their authors always want their identities revealed? Did the Library of Congress catalogue such works without entering their names? If anyone knows more about this I'd love to hear.
Yitzy
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Yitzy,
You may find the following article on anonymous CIA operatives to be interesting. While not related to library science, it sheds some life on what it means to be responsible for great achievements without having the benefit of taking credit for them.
http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/ray.washingtonpost.cia91897.html
Yoel,
Thanks for your reply. My professor actually worked for a secret government agency. He said he once heard a lecture given by the head librarian of the CIA but no one knew the guys position because it was a secret.
Most anonymous books, the actual author is known even if there's a pen name on the book. I'd probably catalogue them by the pen name, though, since that's what's actually on the book.
How are Mark Twain's books entered? under his pen name or actual name?
In the case of seforim, there sometimes isn't even a pen name. Reb Aron Leib Shteinman when he wrote Ayeles Hashachar on gmara (Talmud) and Reb Shlomo Wolbe when he wrote Alei Shur on musar(ethics) didn't use pen names. They just published anonomously.
I've seen pseudonymous books catalogued by pen-name with the real name in brackets immediately after.
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