Authority Records and Databases
Today (4/4/08) Christine Oka was describing a citation/author search issue in the Gale/Thompson databases. The Gale/Thompson databases do not have authority records listing known variations( such as misspellings and regional variants) in author names. This lack of meta data makes searching for a given citation somewhat of a challenge as you have to systematically search the database on each variant search term.
This is analogous to have to driving down every street in a subdivision to locate every house with the last name smith on the mailbox.