John,
I'm having trouble with this publisher-as-label thing because I don't
understand what it's labeling. I could see the publisher name as being a
label for the entity that published the book, but I don't understand the
publisher label in relation to the item being described. Unless, of
course, the entire bibliographic description is being considered a label
for the item being described, but then that makes the description
monolithic, which I think is exactly what we're trying to get away from.
kc
John Attig wrote:
> At 04:19 AM 8/4/2007, Mikael Nilsson wrote:
>> lör 2007-08-04 klockan 00:13 -0400 skrev John Attig:
>> > But a publisher is ALSO a label that appears in a
>> > particular form on a specific resource.
>>
>> I can see the need to describe the label itself.
>>
>> BUT - and this is the important part - a Label is not the same thing as
>> a Publisher. If you see the label as a resource in its own right, it has
>> attributes that can e very different from the attributes a Publisher
>> might have:
>>
>> Label:
>> Publisher name
>> Publisher address
>> Font size
>> color
>> dimensions
>>
>> Publisher:
>> name
>> address
>> no of employees
>> legal contact
>> website
>> owned by
>>
>>
>> Saying that these things are the SAME object makes no sense whatsoever
>> for me.
>>
>> And this is again why the one-to-one principle comes into play - what is
>> it that RDA wants to describe? The label or the publisher or both?
>>
>>
>> > In fact,
>> > in the context of resource identification, this
>> > is perhaps its most important function. The
>> > publisher is NOT (or at least not exclusively)
>> > an external entity that can be related to many
>> > bibliographic resources; it is an attribute of one particular
>> > resource.
>>
>> Well, I think the Publisher *is* an external entity, but that there is a
>> third entity that comes into play here, the Label...
>>
>> And the fact that one label is closely tied to a single resource is
>> really just a constraint on the model (one-to-one relationship between a
>> label and a resource). It does not mean that DCAM cannot capture the
>> descriptions or that a hierarchical description is somehow more suited.
>>
>> What I am hearing is that the label is an important resource itself -
>> and that fact should be recorded in RDA.
>>
>> Maybe RDA needs a rda:publisher property that gives the actual
>> Publisher, and a separate rda:publisherlabel that presents the label.
>
> In fact, I believe that this is what has been done in the RDA Element
> Analysis: Publication Statement and its sub-elements (lines 46 ff.) is a
> label and Publisher (line 285) is the actual publisher -- and is an
> access point, i.e., a link to an external entity/resource.
>
> Actually, almost all of the elements grouped under "Resource
> Identification" are labels, and many of them have counterparts under
> either "Persons, Families, or Corporate Bodies associated with the
> Resource" or "Related Resources" that serve as links to external
> entities/resources. The distinctive feature of the "Publication
> Statement" element is that it has been defined as a complex statement
> made up of various sub-elements with internal relationships between
> instances that need to be recorded.
>
> Again, I am NOT arguing that this hierarchical approach is the only
> valid approach, only that there are relationships between instances of
> what we have defined as sub-elements that need to be recorded.
>
> John
>
>
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