I've made the changes to the database as planned, and as far as I can tell, everything is working well. Results:

• The "Authors" table is now a "Persons" table, but it works just the same way.
• The "Persons" table now includes entries for all the people who were previously identified in the "Illustrator" field of the "Poems" table.
• The original "Illustrator" field is now renamed to "OLD Illustrator field"; eventually it will go away entirely.
• Below it there is now a new "Illustrators" field, which is a one-to-many link to the "People" table, working just like the "Authors" field.
• People in the "People" table who were imported from the old "Illustrator" field have the word "Illustrator" in their Notes field. That's just for information and convenience, and can be removed if necessary.
• Information on the new people in the "People" table (i.e. illustrators) is sparse, because we had very little info about them in the "Poems" table before. Someone will have to edit each of those entries. For instance, they all have unknown gender at the moment.
• It's possible that if the same person is both an author and an illustrator, they now appear in the "People" table twice; CE will be checking through all the illustrators and merging records where necessary.

Detailed explanation of the code steps follows in the next post.