Quoting "J. McRee Elrod" <m...@slc.bc.ca>:
Don't assume failure on the part of the cataloguer; it may be patron desire. Patron convenience seems to be the forgotten factor in much or our discussions.
Not only do I not assume "failure" on the part of the cataloguer, I don't assume "failure" at all. But the fact is that we can only work with the data we have in our bibliographic records regardless of what data *possibilities* there are in the MARC record. I believe this is indisputable.
My preference would be address the problem though systems, rather than changing records, e.g., to have 240s suppressed in display and hitlists, but that would remove 240s from classical music and Shakespeare as well.
It's not rocket science to keep 240's in music records, as long as they are coded as music records, and drop them from text records. It's not even rocket science to display uniform titles for items with multiple Expressions. There are a lot of possibilities, but for these possibilities to become realities we have to get the data out of MARC in into a more manipulable format. These things are a pain to do with our current data, but I think they become much more plausible with a format that is less based on the structure of the display and more on the meaning of the data. In fact, the RDA elements, as defined, are closer to this concept of manipulable data elements than MARC is. That's not to say that RDA is perfect as a cataloging code, but it is based on more modern data concepts than AACR/MARC was.
kc -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
