Hello Ferran! >[...] >> > I know Marc21 reasonably well, and I don't remember now any case >> > where having different indicators mean something so different that >> > has to be treat differently. >> >> Here I would be more careful. Basically, I would treat Marc fields and >> indicators not as 3 digits plus two other funny chars but consider the >> whole bunch as a 5 character wide filed designation. I think, here I'm >> in fact a bit more in line with Estebans approach. At least if I >> understand it correctly. (Though I agree with you that one might not >> come up with a complete bibfield list, but just with a set of "most >> common usages".) > >But «most common usages» won't cover them all, and so, you cannot load >arbitrary records coming from unknown sources and expect Invenio to do >the expected thing with them.
I'm not sure, but I think its basically a missunderstanding but we generally agree. As I said, for indexing/dispaly I perfectly agree with you. In definition of the fields as such, telling invenio what in input e.g. an "author" should be one could, and probably should, be more explicit. > Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from > others. Perfectly agree. I'd add the famous Einstein her. As simple as possible, but not simpler. ;) >> I share some concerns about this with Ferran and Martin and some >> others, and I'm very sure it's quite a task... > >I don't think it is so difficult if the code just accepts 245%% for >title, 100%% for first author, etc. With a 10% effort we could cover >more than 95% of the cases. > >Alexander, would you accept to exchange the current Invenio default >behaviour with the default I'm proposing? Knowing that it would not be >perfect, do you think that it would be better? I think in general, yes. As said above, I feel we perfecly agree about how Invenios default indexing and even dispaly should be set up, and there %% is in all cases I see better than __. If one defines a field, lets stick to author, I would however suggest, that the definition says: - Author should be 1001_ and stored as lastname, firstname - alternatively 1002_ and sorted firstname lastname (note: deprecated) - as fallback 100%% is treated as author in the index in case we have foreign data (note: very deprecated) You 245 example is quite telling and the people with not to much library background might miss the point here a bit, simply as "title" is as such a quite simple field in the sense that it is only a string, from the IT point of view. The point missed here, and it is really an important point, is that if you get foreign data you /never/ get 245__ in your Marc, you'll /always/ get indicators. So, stock invenio if I pull in 10.000 records from our latest ebook package e.g. will have no titles. I consider this indeed a bug, not an inconvenience. Even our modernists who consider Marc ancient should agree that data exchange is quite important. And no, I do not know /any/ format that can transport the richness of Marc in a standardized, accepted manner, nor do I know any format that is used for such a host of data as Marc21. (If you consider it ancient, pease note that currently all german library catalogues are migrated to use it instead of our own invention MAB.) Hey, journal literature from the sciences is really quite trivial. Book literatrue from the humanities is quite a different story. If you don't believe it have some fun with http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/PPNSET?PPN=741186039 and it's friends. Additionally, those indicators contain a strong meaning. I agree that the first indicator might be considered superflous in databases (it is probably /not/ if you consider that you have to create a bibliography, and this is a /very/ common request). Disregarding the second indicator is another story. If you have a large bibliography it isn't too sensible to use a blind string sorting. You'll get so many entries in T that you don't find your stuff anymore. Yes, I know, these are offline bibliographies. Yes, I hate to print a database. I feel it is completely sensless. Yes, I work for several years now in converting all our peers to accept an URL instead of 400 pages of paper. BUT, IRL they often don't like trees and insist on silly printed lists. Yes, ignoring "The" in sorting would be simple, but just to add German we have 3 definite articles and two indefinite articles, of course they have a different lenght and if you add other languages, well. -- Kind regards, Alexander Wagner Subject Specialist Central Library 52425 Juelich mail : a.wag...@fz-juelich.de phone: +49 2461 61-1586 Fax : +49 2461 61-6103 www.fz-juelich.de/zb/DE/zb-fi ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH 52425 Juelich Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498 Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir Dr. Karl Eugen Huthmacher Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem (Vorsitzender), Karsten Beneke (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt, Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
