On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 5:09 PM, George Oates <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2/14/11 11:07 AM, Sarah Breau wrote: >> Am I the only one who doesn't see the problem with merging all the works by >> one >> person into one author record? Why is it bad that all the individual Samuel >> Clemens and Mark Twain records are merged into one? I haven't worked on those >> records, but I think that if I had I probably would have done some merging, >> so >> please let me know where the error lies. ;-) I actually prefer a single record for all of an author's works, but I can kind of see why some people would want to keep them separate when, for example, an author uses different pseudonyms for different genres. >> That being said, I once went through and cleaned up some of the multitude of >> Dr. >> Seuss author records, and in the process I changed them to direct to the >> Theodore Geisel record. Later, someone went back and changed the author name >> to >> Dr. Seuss, with the comment that everyone calls him Dr. Seuss, not Theodore >> Geisel. Not true, since he also published under his own name, and now all >> those >> works ERRONEOUSLY show the author name as "Dr. Seuss" as well. But I'm not >> going >> to get into a Wikipedia-style edit war over it. I suspect "everyone" was code for "is most commonly known as" in this case. I think I'd agree that he's most commonly know as Dr. Seuss, but would be happy to have the main name on the record be either name. I certainly wouldn't call it erroneous if the consensus was for a different name form than the one I preferred. > For what it's worth, I doubt OL will ever institute any policies on OL > cataloging practice. It's intended to be wiki-like, not proscriptive. If there > are standards out there in library-world that you deem useful, then go ahead. I don't think wikis and guidelines are mutually exclusive -- just look at Wikipedia (although I think they go much too far with their rules). I think a set of community developed style guidelines would be very useful in helping everyone coherently manage such a large set of data. There's already at least one rule/guideline (normal name order), so really we're just discussing whether it's worth expanding that set and what's the right balance between number of guidelines and usability. Tom _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
