I have Split my Bibliographic Database enhancement proposals into 4 seperate proposals.        
My full proposal and links to relevant wweb based information is at        
http://www.users.bigpond.com/dnwilson/biblio1.html        
  
Proposal 3.     
  
 Add a Separate but Linked Author List to the Bibliographic Database.   
Some style guides require different formats of the Author?s name. Bibliographic software  
 often uses clever string manipulation to achieve this (Sixpac does this) (Wilson, D.N.) or  
(D.N. Wilson) or  (David N. Wilson). This is a risky and fault prone method. It is better  
to maintain separate  fields. An advantage of this would be that it would help ensure that  
each reference to an  author used the same identifier. We can see the problems this causes in Library catalogs, with   
multiple variations of an authors name and different books listed under each variant of the name  
 ? and no full list of the authors books.   
 
I suggest a separate but linked Author table with the fields,    
 
Surname,    
First and other names   
Initials 	(of the First and other names),    
Dates		(as used in Library catalogs to separate Authors of the Same Name;    
			as in (Smith, Fred, 1928 ? 1989) or (Smith, Fred, 1954 - ) or    
		(Smith, Fred, circa 1550).   
Notes 	(general text area)   
 
The initials could be automatically added from the user entry. As is done with OpenOffice Initial  
 user information collection dialog box, But not including the surname) eg -   
 
Wilson, David Noel, D.N., 1954 - , ?Watch his author he will go far?.   
 
The ?Insert>Indexes and Tables>Bibliographic Entry? dialog box would be changed to replace the text  
 entry field with a Pick List of Authors and a button to add a new authors to the Author table.   
 
I can see that there may be some conflict with my proposal and the proposal -   
 
		?A OpenOffice database driver for the access to any BibTech databases. 
		This can then use instead of our current Bibliography Database, which 
		 is a simple dBase table.?  
				(From the OpenOffice word processing project todo list.)   
 
But perhaps it is possible the two objections will not actually conflict.