There may be reason to suggest or prefer or constrain what kinds of
identifiers can be used, for consistency. It's hard to write software
that can expect _any_ kind of identifier at all.
But if that _should_ be done, I think it should be done in the 'usage'
end (RDA itself, not that I believe RDA itself touches this with a ten
foot poll), not at the schema/vocabulary level that Karen is working on.
I agree.
Jonathan
Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
> Karen:
>
> I agree with Ed as well (once he corrected me on the topic at
> hand)--we have been existing for some time in a world that uses a lot
> of different identifiers, and I don't think we're in any better
> position than were to cut down on that, nor is there any real reason
> to do so.
>
> I would point out that in your examples below (and in Ed's as far as I
> can tell) there's a bit of mushiness about whether one is identifying
> a resource or a description of a resource (a.k.a. metadata record).
> Interestingly, we've been pretty good in MARC about making the
> distinction clear (in different fields, for the most past), though in
> practice we've tended to muddy the waters a bit, given that LCCNs and
> OCLC numbers are far more ubiquitous than real resource identifiers
> (ISBNs, ISSNs, etc.).
>
> We surely need both, and, as you say, we need to be really, really
> clear about what we're identifying.
>
> Diane
>
> Karen Coyle wrote:
>> I agree with Ed that we aren't in a position to make statements about
>> "best" identifiers at this point in time, and that the bottom line is
>> that all identifiers for instances must be URIs.
>>
>> At the same time, I think that we need to scrutinize re-use of
>> identifiers in the same way that we scrutinize the re-use of metadata
>> elements. The rule for metadata elements is that use must be
>> determined by the definition of the element, and we can use this same
>> rule for identifiers. Some examples:
>>
>> ISBN: product number assigned by publisher.
>> LCCN: number assigned by Library of Congress that identifies a
>> metadata record in the LoC system.
>> OCLC number: number assigned by OCLC that identifies a metadata record
>> in the OCLC system.
>> etc.
>>
>> We often re-use these numbers because they are handy hooks into
>> metadata databases, but we should always use them with their original
>> meaning intact. I'm all in favor of including all of these numbers in
>> our metadata because they can be useful, but we shouldn't consider
>> that any of them actually *identify* metadata that we create. They
>> always identify what they are originally defined as identifying.
>>
>> kc
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Ed Summers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Diane I. Hillmann
>>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The identifiers for the FRBR entities are coming--we're just
>>>> waiting for an
>>>> agreement within IFLA on the domain name, and they'll be added to
>>>> the NSDL
>>>> Registry--with luck by the end of the year.
>>>>
>>> I think Rob was talking about identifiers for actual *instances* of
>>> FRBR Entities, not about identifiers for classes and whatnot in the
>>> FRBR vocabulary.
>>>
>>> My personal opinion is that RDA should follow in the footsteps of RDF
>>> and allow any sort of URI to be used to identify a bibliographic
>>> resource. One could well imagine RDA users wating to use ISBN URNs,
>>> natural keys expressed as URLs, info-uris, DOIs and Handles expressed
>>> as URIs, etc. It seems premature to restrict the types of identifiers
>>> that oould be used other than requiring them to be URIs.
>>>
>>> //Ed
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
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