Currently the ANS data does not contain the author data - just a reference to the author ID in Authors Service.
This causes issues in cases where , for example:
A person works as an intern or co-op and has their author type in Authors as a correspondent. Then they are hired as full time staff and their author type is changed from Correspondent to Staff. Now suddenly looking at their old stories their byline reads Globe Staff when they were not staff at the time of publishing the story.
Same issue with someone who is a freelancer and is entered as a guest author and now they are staff. I had thought we could enter them as a correspondent, update the older stories with that data and then change their author type to staff for stories going forward but that is not possible.
This is both incorrect and could cause problems with the union if we are identifying someone as staff who is not staff.
Lynda Finley
It's really tricky finding the right balance between author metadata that should remain a snapshot in time (such as the credit in your example, or someone who gets married and would like to be known by a new name only on a going-forward basis) vs metadata that should be updated on all content globally, even retroactively (such as fixing a typo, or someone who gets married and wants all their content to have their new name on it on a global basis). We certainly support any efforts that could be made to accommodate more use cases than the way it currently works!