One aspect of encoding agents which has been particularly frustrating when
using DC to describe historical documents such as photographs is that
historical addresses (for either individuals or corporate entities) are
quite useful in giving end users more context for understanding the source
of a photograph; however, including addresses in the current agent elements
normally means including them in keyword or author indexes as well. This
type of information is often just 'noise' getting in the way of the agent
'signal'.
Properly, this type of information might be included in the thesaurus or
other controlled vocabulary from which the agent's name comes. But
generally there is no externally maintained vocabulary to put this data into
much less a connection to it which would be accessible by end users
discovering the resource.
In XML qualified DC records, we've often used attributes to qualify the
specific role of an agent as well as indicate which authority controls the
form of the name given; but including historical addresses (or other info
such as historical phone numbers) as an attribute seems less appropriate.
So the question we normally come back to is what information is appropriate
to the descriptive DC record failing a formal connection to some
maintainable authority? At the same time how do we provide access to that
information for end users without cluttering the DC indices?
BTW, for historical addresses, the date elsewhere in the DC record provides
context for understanding the address given. If historical addresses are
maintained external to the DC record, dates must be able to be associated
with them.
Wayne
----------------
R. Wayne Shoaf
Director
Information Delivery, Organization & Retrieval
Information Services Division
University of Southern California
University Village, UVI, Bldg. A
3305 South Hoover Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007-3557
213.740.4090
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: General DCMI discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrew Wilson
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 4:35 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Describing Agents
>
> Dear All
>
> You may know that the Agents WG is actively seeking to
> develop a way of
> describing agents within the context of DCMES resource
> descriptions. The
> need/requirement to describe agents arises in many contexts
> of course, and
> we expect that the work of the Agents WG will be relevant to
> work underway
> in a number of other DCMI Working Groups, for example
> Education, Libraries,
> Collection Description, Government. It may be that the work
> of the Agents
> WG to date is sufficient to meet the agent description needs
> of other DCMI
> Activities. However, in order to develop a widely useful
> approach to agent
> description it will be valuable for the needs of other WGs to
> be explicitly
> identified.
>
> As co-chairs of the Agents WG, we are seeking your views on the agent
> description needs of any of the DCMI communities and working
> groups. If you
> have any thoughts or views on this issue please mail them to
> this list, or
> the Agents WG list. As a starting point you might care to
> read the current
> draft of a document setting out one view of the functional
> requirements for
> describing agents. The document is available at:
> http://dublincore.org/groups/agents/agentFRdraft2-2.html.
>
> Thank you!!
>
> John Roberts & Andrew Wilson
> 16 November 2005
>
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