"Institute Historian, T.F. Peterson" in Library of Congress database

When "Nightwork" was published, the author was identified as "Institute Historian, T. F. Peterson." The Library of Congress (LC) cataloged this book in WorldCat, an international bibliographic database.

The Library of Congress creates what is called "authority records" to create a database of names of known authors. These records contain the author's name, birth/death dates if known, and identifying information such as "Professor at such and such university." This helps other libraries cataloging future works by a given author.

So, the Library of Congress duly created an authority record for a T. F. Peterson, author of Nightwork, despite this person not existing. In a note, they identified T.F. Peterson as the MIT Historian.

Here is a copy of the record:

ARN: 5874162
Rec stat: n Entered: 20020925
1 010 n 2002161194
2 040 DLC eng DLC
3 005 20020925153604.0
4 100 1 Peterson, T. F.
5 670 Peterson, T. F. Nightwork, 2003: CIP t.p. (T.F. Peterson, MIT Institute Historian)