Quoting "Brenndorfer, Thomas" <tbrenndor...@library.guelph.on.ca>:
If "etc." why not "et al."?
The opposite direction was discussed in the documents above-- either
eliminate terms with ",etc." or redefine the scope of the base terms
"Laws", "Treaties", "Protocols". That still might happen in the
future, and so most of the last remaining required special
abbreviations may yet disappear.
"etc." needs to go away with its partner "other" (heavily used in MARC
vocabularies, not in RDA). Neither of these imparts any information
nor does it provide a way to expand a list as needed.
One of the advantages to having the controlled lists online and
downloadable is that we can provide a way for folks to add suggested
new terms to a list (or to gather those automatically from actual
records). RDA allows for using terms from a list or, if the term you
need is not in the list, adding your own term. This is the way we
should go, but we need to do it in a coordinated way so that new terms
1) are standardized 2) get distributed to the community.
I think we can do that in a reasonably efficient and cost-effective
way as part of data sharing. One possibility is that for vocabularies
for specialized materials (especially fast-evolving media) that a
representative group from that cataloging community be placed in
charge of the list. That way decisions can be made more quickly than
if the entire cataloging community has to consider the new terms. In
that way, the specialist group will be performing a service for the
whole community, since many of those media make it into all libraries
(think DVD, BluRay, and whatever is coming next).
Note that the current RDA Vocabularies in the Open Metadata Registry
[1] are given a "status" (provisional, published.. and there could be
others) that would help us manage this process. So the list management
technology is there, but the community mechanism isn't. In addition,
any cataloger workstations would need to allow the cataloger to either
select from a list *or* add a new term. The hard part is managing the
gathering and evaluating of new terms, but I'm betting that catalogers
could learn to check a wiki or specific discussion area for
developments before adding a new term in isolation. Working together
is what we do well already, we just need to build on that.
kc
[1] http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
