Bernhard Eversberg wrote: <snip> J. McRee Elrod wrote: > > We agree with Martha Yee (see below*) that the best display of descriptive > information for electronic resources is the unlabeled ISBD choice and > order of elements (including collation), as it is for all other > library resources. > For the display standard, I agree. </snip>
If I may engage in a bit of deconstruction, I would like to change "the display standard" to "a display standard" because I don't think it is possible today to achieve such a thing as *the* display standard. Semantic meaning, which is important, is achieved in another way in today's environment. Therefore, I see the ISBD display as, for instance, the "expert's" display, a standard display that the experts can rely on. But each database manager, and perhaps each user, will be able to determine the display he or she wants. <snip> The data model we need for today's environments needs to be an entirely different thing. First of all, it should not focus on physical entities and their complete description in one record, complete in itself and without actionable links to other entities. That's what the MARC record still is, in actual practice. As long as this does not change fundamentally, there is little RDA can effect. (The potential is all there in MARC, but practice must change. There's no need to kill it.) For RDA is based on a data model that breaks the self-contained description up into different kinds of entities, and ties them together by actionable links. </snip> While I agree that we could probably use a new data model, I think that first it is necessary to find out what both we and the public need. The FRBR/RDA data model is certainly highly suspect. Perhaps the answer will be to separate our current resources into different entities--or not. Perhaps they will be different entities than what we envision now. All of this is impossible to know without testing. The easiest way to know what people would want is, as I have mentioned in previous messages, to follow what Tim Berners-Lee suggested and open up our data to the public, while linking what can be linked, and see what happens. I have a feeling that we would all be very surprised what people would want from our records and how they may utilize them. James L. Weinheimer j.weinhei...@aur.edu Director of Library and Information Services The American University of Rome Rome, Italy
