Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <rochk...@jhu.edu>:
There's still a question of whether this is sufficient -- is it sufficient to say that _anything_ with more than one 336 not of the same type is a "kit"
No -- a book with a disk inside the cover, or a magazine issue with a disk, is NOT a kit.
As another topic, if what we're asking is whether the seperation into the triple of 336 337 and 338 makes sense in the first place (whether for a single item, or an aggregate 'box o stuff') -- I think the answer is that it turns out to be _very_ difficult to develop an ontology/vocabulary/terminology for what turns out to the complicated and context-sensitive notion of content/carrier/genre/form/format/type/whatever-you-call it. Our users own notions of these things are _not_ consistent, and are _very_ context and community dependent. But if we give up on being consistent and just throw terms into a giant grab bag of form/format/genre/carrier -- well, that's pretty much what we had with MARC GMD/SMD (I say MARC and not AACR2 intentionally here -- AACR2 doesn't even mention these! a seperate problem is only our _encoding format_ standard mentions this data element!) -- and it ended up just turning into a mess which made it very difficult for systems to serve users well, especially in non-typical contexts. I think what RDA decided was we should come up with as consistent and rational an ontology as possible for form/format/genre/etc, and once encoded rationally, different systems could take this data and slice, dice, recombine, and display them differently as appropriate for the context or user community. I think this was the right choice, and that the 336/337/338 content/media/carrier three-facet ontology is as complete, flexible, and consistent an ontology as I've seen anywhere for this stuff, I think whoever came up with it did a good job of analysis there.
But would it have been better to have the data now recorded in three fields, 336/337/338, recorded in a single field, repeatable as often as required? That reduces the linking problem to simply using $3 to specify the material to which the field applies -- no need for $8 links, or for preserving the original tag order to maintain semantic linking (which, as already pointed out, some systems can't do).
Hal Cain Melbourne, Australia hec...@dml.vic.edu.au ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
