Quoting "J. McRee Elrod" <m...@slc.bc.ca>:
Johnathan said:
I'm not sure -- what is it meant to accomplish? What information does
'kit' capture or convey that isn't captured by Thomas' suggestion for
how to record?
It tells the patron what the resource is, in language the patron can
understand.
But this is what I said before, and I've been thinking about it: "kit"
doesn't mean much to me. I know what an "emergency kit" is, or a
"sewing kit" or a "shaving kit," but just because something has
multiple parts doesn't mean that I would apply the term "kit" in my
native language, and I can't think of a situation in which I would use
"kit" alone without a qualifier. I would probably not equate "kit"
with an educational package with stones and hammer and a book about
rocks. Or with a chemistry set.
So I don't think you can say that "kit" is in the language of the
patron. It's the language of the cataloger, and it's artificial --
perhaps not as artificial as the three RDA values, but it's still
artificial. You're comfortable with it because you've been assigning
"kit" to resources for .... possibly decades. But that doesn't mean
users get what you mean.
I don't have a way to pull up a bunch of records with "kit" in the
GMD, but it would be interesting to contrast those records with, for
example, what it's called in Amazon if it's on sale there. They use
"educational games", "educational toys" and other terms (possibly from
BISAC). These might be more along the line of what non-catalogers
would call those things.
kc
p.s. The wikipedia disambiguation page for "kit" is interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit
But this seems less and less the goal of RDA.
It kind of seems to me like kit just means "A bunch of stuff together,
we're not going to tell you exactly what ...
See the 505, and/or repeating 300s. Makes more sense than a bunch of
strange terms between collation and series, as they will appear in
some OPACs.
__ __ 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
