Mike Tribby wrote: > "To make a parallel between Clint Eastwood and Ox Eckhardt, your desire > to find out that Ox Eckhardt hit .371 in 1932 for the Mission Reds to win > the Pacific Coast League batting title would be akin to finding out that > Clint Eastwood took "x" number of days to direct the film UNFORGIVEN, or > worked "y" number of dollars on his role in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND > THE UGLY. Just like the case with Eckhardt, these facts about Eastwood-- > whether or not anyone finds them interesting or important--are > bibliographically insignificant. They would not belong in the OPAC." > > If you frame it that way, sure, but if my curiosity about the PCL batting > titles in the 1930s related to a sabremetric study of batting averages > across the minor leagues during a time when the major league batting > averages were at alltime highs, it might still be trivia to Clint Eastwood > fans, but not to baseball statisticians.
The point wasn't that the information was either trivial or of utmost importance to anyone for any reason. The point was that Eckhardt's baseball stats have nothing to do (bibliographically) with the relationship between him and a resource in the OPAC. Just like Eastwood's acting salary has nothing to do (bibliographically) with the relationship between him and the movie in the OPAC. These may be facts contained within resources, but they are not things that library metadata deal with. Now, it's possible that a library has a resource all about Eckhardt's baseball stats, and another all about Eastwood's salaries; the OPAC records might then have subject headings dealing with those topics, but again, any specific statistics would need to be found within the resource itself, not in the bibliographic metadata. Kevin M. Randall Principal Serials Cataloger Northwestern University Library k...@northwestern.edu (847) 491-2939 Proudly wearing the sensible shoes since 1978!
