At 10:45 PM 4/13/2010, Karen Coyle wrote:
Can anyone explain, or point me to an explanation, for how "Signatory
to a treaty, etc." became defined as an attribute of a Work, rather
than a corporate body with a relationship to a work? It's the only
potential Group 2 entity that has ended up in Group 1 space, so I
assume there is something particular about it.
The RDA element "Signatory to a treaty, etc." is an attribute of the
work. It is particularly important when formulating access points
(both preferred and variant) for a treaty. For historical reasons,
access points for bilateral treaties are formulated using the names
of the signatories, a form term "Treaties, etc." and the date of the
treaty signing:
Australia. Treaties, etc. United States, 2007 September 5
(As Ed Jones noted, access points serve as textual identifiers for
the work and combine different elements together into a construct in
order to accomplish this. In addition, the headings for treaties are
designed to produce a structured set of results when sorted
alphabetically -- in this case, a list of all the treaties of which
Australia is a party, sub-arranged by the other party to the treaty
and the date of signing. There would be a variant access point under
"United States. Treaties, etc. Australia, 2007 September 5" that
would be part of a similar alphabetical list of treaties under the
other party.)
The complete examples for RDA (see Appendix M of the draft for
constituency review:
http://www.rdaonline.org/constituencyreview/Phase1AppM_11_10_08.pdf
includes as "Work 4" the authority record for the treaty above.
"Signatory to a treaty, etc." is therefore one of several identifying
elements necessary to distinguish between different treaties
(works). This is independent of the role of the signatories as
creators of the work. Note in the authority record example, that
Australia and United States are also identified as creators -- and
presumably, in a linked data environment, this would be encoded as a
relationship to the corporate bodies.
The way in which RDA elements are combined into precoordinated access
points is one of the features of RDA that does not fit terribly well
into the linked-data environment that we are anticipating, but it is
a critical component to how we currently control and provide access
to the entities in question -- particularly in the case of works and
expressions.
John Attig
Authority Control Librarian
Penn State University
jx...@psu.edu
