Quoting "J. McRee Elrod" <m...@slc.bc.ca>:
Karen Coyle said:
Any place in our records where we do not provide controlled or
controllable data we are cutting off any possibility of making use of
that for anything but display.
The purpose of the transcribed imprint is *identification*. If 260$l
normalized publisher name replaces 260$b transcribed publisher name,
duplicate records will probably result.
It "identifies" only because it is displayed to humans. It does not
identify for any machine processes. So I take your point that the
purpose is identification, but it is identification in a limited
sense, that is to the human reader of the catalog entry. That is not a
bad thing, but it limits what we can do with the data. For example, we
cannot do this with out catalogs:
-- give me a list of all of the books published in London from 1853-1857
-- show me which publishers are prominent in this subject area
With some fairly minor changes to our data we could provide this kind
of information. We could decide it's not our purview, but I think we
are selling ourselves short by taking a very narrow view of what
bibliographic data can reveal, information-wise.
kc
Display is not an end in itself. Data is displayed for a reason.
While "FR" may mean "functional requirements", cataloguer and patron
needs seem to be far from our awareness. We seem more interested in
playing in our data sandbox.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
