Techniques employed in a variety of applications, including art history, bibliography, genealogy, commerce, and government are reviewed, providing a framework of personal name characteristics, factors in selecting matching techniques, and types of applications. As data elements, personal name characteristics vary for reasons of culture, history, translation and transliteration, reporting and recording variations, and typographic or phonetic errors. Personal name-matching techniques may be incorporated into name authority work, information retrieval, or duplicate detection. This article covers phonetic- and pattern-matching techniques. The problems and solutions discussed in this comprehensive survey of all methods of name matching can be applied to law enforcement information retrieval systems. The article features an extensive bibliography. 2 tables and 72 references