Karen Coyle said: >It is a 3-part data construct. The full description of a book will be >made up of many statements. The big difference between what we do >today and the "recordless" view is that each of these statements is >able to be used independently of the context in which it was created. Karen, one of our clients just proposed (after reading one of your articles) that we create MARC records for them from publisher metadata enriched by Bowker. A full 90% of the published books they distribute have very good LAC (Library and Archived Canada) records, complete with classification numbers, controlled main and added entries, accurate transcription, excellent notes, and subject headings in two languages. In fact, LAC MARC records are now far superior to current LC (Library of Congress) records, which seem to be in a sharp decline, not to mention not turning AACR2 on its head for reproductions.
Perhaps in your writing you should make in clearer that (1) we are not there yet, and that (2) individual cataloguing agencies will not be replacing national catalogue agency records with "upstream" data. We will experiment with enriched metadata in the automated production of proto MARC records to be completed by cataloguers, for the 10% of titles for which we do not find LAC records. (These are all Canadian publications.) I suspect however that if there is much capture of upspream data, it would be by the national cataloguing agencies. __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([email protected]) {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
