>The argument is vociferously made that spelling out "edition" instead of >writing "ed." (saving 4 characters) is extra time that catalogers can't afford
Or better yet, spelling out Minnesota instead of Minn. repeated as many times as I have occasion to do original cataloging on items published in Minnesota, which in our case is quite a few--easily hundreds over a year. Not to mention spelling out "pages," "illustrations," and any number of bits that show up in most if not all records. It adds up. >at the same time as many of the same people advocate always adding one-three >sentence notes in addition to coded materials, for somewhat unclear user >benefit. An example would be nice, but my conscience is clear on this one. I don't advocate adding anything that doesn't absolutely need to be there and would welcome the day when coding in the machine readable portion of the record would spawn whatever text were needed. Besides, end-users tend to want more grist for keyword searching. >something far more expensive and less powerful than it could be if we cared >about creating clean data for machine processing And if it works for humanoids, too, so much the better? Maybe this is the crux of the larger question. Mike Tribby Senior Cataloger Quality Books Inc. The Best of America's Independent Presses mailto:mike.tri...@quality-books.com
