I *am* a music cataloger and will try to do my best to answer questions
in this thread.
My first question -- what is "the final product" referred to below? I
just did a phrase search of the RDA Toolkit, and the term "preferred
access point" does not appear. This terminology was used in earlier
drafts of RDA and was abandoned in favor of the "authorized access
point" terminology (for which there are 346 hits in the RDA Toolkit).
Likewise, please give an actual instruction number citation from the RDA
Toolkit (or the print RDA) for the Hebrew examples. If these are still
problems, ALA Publishing will certainly want to correct them.
RDA has "deconstructed" the concept of the uniform title, and that term
is not used anywhere in the instructions. RDA's "preferred title" is
closest in concept to AACR2's "initial title element" in a uniform title
string. The rest of the elements added to create the authorized access
point are not actually title elements (opus number, key, etc.). This is
a conceptual difference between AACR2 and RDA, like it or not.
RDA also makes a significant distinction in Chapter 6 between recording
elements associated with the work or expression (6.0-6.26) and creating
authorized access points (6.27-6.31). This may be the source of the
sense of repetition in the instructions, although I believe no actual
repetition occurs. The potential exists in the future for systems to
build unique access points on the fly from the data elements recorded
that are associated with any given work or expression. If/when we get to
this point, the instructions for manually constructing character strings
to represent works or expressions will become moot.
Kathy Glennan
Chair, Music Library Association's Bibliographic Control Committee
Head, Special Resources Cataloging / Music Cataloger
University of Maryland
On 3/9/2011 2:50 PM, Gene Fieg wrote:
I am not a music cataloger; I do it when it comes across my desk, but
I don't work primarily in musical materials.
That said, I was wondering what music catalogers think of RDA and the
myriad (to me, anyway) and repetitive instructions in chapter 6.
While I was reading the final product, I saw "preferred access point"
just below a paragraph that mentioned an "authorized" access point.
(What??)
Also in those instructions on music, someone has to proofread the
Hebrew examples. The transliteration does not match the sequence of
the Hebrew characters. That should be fixed. (When I was commenting
on the drafts, I saw the same thing for personal names in Hebrew,
Moshe Dayan, for example.
For me, at least, a unform title is the entire string; it is not the
title plus the qualifiers. This splitting off of qualifiers from what
a uniform title is became too clear to me in the opening section on
musical works when it instructs us to use Symphonies; only later on do
we get the the numbers added as qualifiers.
RDA takes the parts of description and in this case the construction
of uniform titles and separates them out as though they were of equal
value, but the the work is not identified by a preferred access point
until /all/ the elements are in one string.
And since RDA is supposed to help us get on board with the Semantic
Web, could someone give me an example of a record that is already on
the Semantic Web? Where is it? How does one find it?
--
Gene Fieg
Cataloger/Serials Librarian
Claremont School of Theology
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
--
Gene Fieg
Cataloger/Serials Librarian
Claremont School of Theology
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
