Quoting Karen Coyle: >Now the question is: is there a use case for including the publisher >identity in the catalog record? Is the publisher a bibliographically >significant entity? Are there particular user needs for this data? Or >is the *only* purpose for recording this that of identification >through a surrogate for the title page?
As always, it depends on the user. For my own research, and for many users I serve professionally (in an independent research library), it is vital to have both transcribed and normalized information for primary resources. I can find things published in London, England, through MARC 752 ‡a Great Britain ‡b England ‡d London. I can find engravings published by John Bowles through 700 ‡a Bowles, John, ‡d 1701-1779, ‡e publisher; but through 260‡b I can see that there are two distinct versions of the plate, each with a varying address for Bowles' firm. It was a revelation to me as a researcher to discover that this kind of granularity was hidden inside library catalogue records, and I'm always thrilled to discover libraries that have implemented searching by MARC subfield (such as LC has at http://catalog.loc.gov/help/ckw-code.htm). Of course, the data has to be there in the first place for this to work. At the Folger, we strive to provide such data for primary sources (i.e., material created in Western Europe between 1500 and 1700, and material relating to Shakespeare created anywhere, to the present day). >Regardless of the answers to the above questions, it seems that we may >be misleading users when we label this data as "Publisher" in our >systems. Agree. This is why I taught myself MARC, and learned about different cataloging conventions. It's also one of the reasons I left academia: given that I was more interested in building relational databases and figuring out MARC than I was in publishing the results of my research, I thought I could do more good from the other side of the fence, bridging the gap between librarians and researchers. EB. -------------------------------------------------- Erin C. Blake, Ph.D. | Curator of Art & Special Collections | Folger Shakespeare Library | 201 E. Capitol St. SE | Washington, DC 20003-1004 | office tel. (202) 675-0323 | fax: (202) 675-0328 | ebl...@folger.edu | www.folger.edu
