Please excuse the naive way this question is formulated: I'm sure the
Information & Library Science community has formal terms for what I'm
attempting to do, but unfortunately I don't know what they are.

The problem I'm trying to solve is that I have a bunch of author names (for
example, 'Charles Dickens') that I need to reformat into standard catalogue
order ('Dickens, Charles'). Obviously the example given is trivial, but of
course this can get quite complex depending on the addition of titles and
honorifics.

Is anyone aware of a software library to perform this kind of conversion?
The programming language used is not terribly important, though Java or
Python would be preferable.

In ideal world the library would deal with the different conventions used
in different languages and by different institutions - but anything would
be better than the current split-on-comma approach I'm using right now.

Thanks,

Timothy Hill