At 10:52 AM 5/6/2008, Karen Coyle wrote:
Would it be possible to separate the descriptive transcription of fields from the linking and relationships between "resources" (considering a book a resource AND the series itself as a resource). In the talk I did at Code4Lib I used the publisher name as an example. There would be good reasons to link bibliographic records to records for publishers (at least for modern works). The latter could have contact information or at least link to the publisher information in ones acquisitions system. This is NOT the same information as the transcribed publisher name that is in the publication statement.
That last sentence is spot on. It seems that we've gotten so afraid of redundancy that we think things that often *look* the same actually *are* the same. But to record the same name in a publisher statement as well as a publisher access point is not redundancy at all. They are two different things. Likewise with series, statement of responsibility, etc. (For example, WorldCat Local shows how horrible it is to confuse the different properties and functions by getting rid of the statement of responsibility and then trying to replace it with a "made up" statement taking some of the data appearing in 1XX/7XX fields.) So yes, it is possible--and necessary--to separate description and linking/access. (That is, when we're talking about access in terms of authority-controlled elements.) We used to do it all the time; AACR2 codified it. We're in danger of losing what we gained in the move from AACR to AACR2, if don't keep in mind the essential differences between elements. It's happened in WorldCat Local, in some CONSER standard records, and elsewhere. Turning everything into data elements is a good thing, as long as we remember what those data elements are for and don't assign functions to them that they can't fulfill. Kevin Kevin M. Randall Principal Serials Cataloger Bibliographic Services Dept. Northwestern University Library 1970 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2300 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: (847) 491-2939 fax: (847) 491-4345
