Kelly Ann Green offered: >> We could follow the practice of lawyers and use "entity" >
Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
Gosh, I think lawyers use lots more terms than that. In my experience, it's the computer scientists who use "entity."
And the followers of FRBR -- I suppose there's some overlap between those groups!
Is there something wrong with "contributor?"
To be serious (even though it's Friday here, and it's been a heavy week for me) we're trying to name a category. All the descriptive terms (author, contributor, compiler, editor, performer, composer, artist, creator) come with fairly specific connotations; if not to us who are involved in the cataloguing arts, to the users who will try to make use of what we give them as, hopefully, useful information, without misleading them. To refer to MARC21 for a moment (and revert to oldfashioned nomenclature), I would be reasonably happy to move into a mode where name headings (including work headings) were *always* categorized with the appropriate code in $4, and getting our system vendors to derive the caption (in a labelled display) from those codes. "Entity" is, in a sense, a non-term; it simply means "something that can be defined and occupies a space in a particular frame of reference." The frame of reference of the information specialist is not exactly the same as that of the user of the catalogue. Now, we still need a term to denote "persons and formal groups of persons" with some kind of responsibility for the document in hand, and/or its content, particularly when not treated as subject. A shared vocabulary does wonders for discussion, clarification, and formulation of a code. Hal Cain Joint Theological Library Parkville, Victoria, Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED]
