I guess Martha et al are suggesting that we _should_ consider "Twelfth night, or What you will" to be a single title. I think she's got a point.
Martha's overall point is an interesting one: "I detect utopian thinking here. If we can analyze and code every layer of meaning in our data, maybe some day the computer can use that data to reason for itself and we can dispense with human reason altogether." No, I don't actually think it's to allow the computer to reason-- that's to me a futile hope/plan, and while it was unfortunately in the original impetus for 'semantic web' technologies, it's not actually, in my opinion what's currently driving, or what's currently useful about, semantic web technologies. (It's instead more about standardization of data formats). But, it is still about "analyzing and coding every (?) layer of meaning in our data". I think Martha is right that you can go too far in this direction. There are also mistakes you can make that aren't about how "far" you've gone, but are just mistakes. This alternate title example might be one. It's possible to go too far on such a 'utopian' project, but it's also quite possible to go not far enough. Our current practices do not go far enough--to much is unanalyzed and and un-coded, which gets in the way of us providing the kinds of software interfaces we want-- and that, unlike some things Martha rightly worries about, ARE feasible. So I firmly believe RDA is on the right path as far as analyzing and coding more carefully than what we've done before. But mistakes can still be made. If "or" is an important word in the title--and I tend to agree it is-- then leaving it out of the recorded data would be a mistake. Apparently others think it's not an important word in the title? There are a whole bunch of approaches that could be taken that still record the word 'or', some of which have been mentioned in this thread already, and others of which we can think of. But that mistakes can and will be made in the pursuit of the goal, I don't think damns the goal. There are problems with the design of what we've got now, problems that I think are critical. So the choices are not sticking with a problem-free present, or risking introducing problems by chancing changes. Jonathan On Jun 28, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
John, et al - Thanks for the clarification. It still seems to me that if we don't consider "Twelfth night, or What you will" to be a single title, then the "or-ness" is not that hard to code. As for how it will display, different communities may opt for different displays. (Kevin Randall was able to come up with an option pretty quickly....) But this does bring up for me some of the ambiguity that seems to be coming out in RDA between display and access. Maybe that's where the concept needs to be reconciled. I think we run into problems like this when we consider the access point to also be the display (or the display form to be the access point). kc John Attig wrote:Karen, I think you have misunderstood the topic of conversation. An alternative title does actually use the word OR or its linguistic equivalent to connect parts of the title. For example, the title of Shakespeare's play in the earliest editions (and many modern ones) is "Twelfth night, or What you will"; the title of Voltaire's story is "Candide, ou L'optimisme". According to provisions of the ISBD, AACR and (until recently) RDA, that entire string is the title proper. Since few people actually are aware of these facts, it seemed strange to include the alternative title (the part following the "or") in the title proper. Hence the decision. The fact that there is no place in RDA for the "or" is (it seems to me) an example of the same effort that results in the 246 field doing double duty as both transcription of what appears on the source and the access point for the variant title. RDA also makes no distinction between the use of a data element for recording information from the source and for providing access. I suspect that the answer to this particular problem is that the actual transcription of the source (the entire source, I would think) will end up in an annotation, when that actual transcription is needed (as it is for rare materials). And Martha is right -- if the "or" is to be part of the display supplied from the encoding of the data elements, then we will need to record the language of each element (or at least of any elements that are not accurately reflected in the record-level language coding). John Attig [not writing as:] ALA Representative to the JSC-- ----------------------------------- Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kcoyle.net ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet fx.: 510-848-3913 mo.: 510-435-8234 ------------------------------------
