I've made the following progress this morning:

• I can now construct inkSlingers in the inkSlingers table and create the appropriate links between them and their documents in the relational tables.
• I've added a View to the db which concatenates the surname and forename of inkSlingers, so that the display and selection of a person is clearer.

What I haven't yet done is elaborate the roles used to cover the full range of the marcrelator set (because my sample data only has authors, editors and undefined roles); and, more important, I'm not yet checking for the prior existence of a person in the inkSlingers table, which means that there are currently duplicate entries. The former is easy to solve, and worth doing if this script will have more general application; the latter is slightly harder, but also probably worth it.