At 11:50 AM 11/17/2008, Karen Coyle wrote:
>John, I believe you are confirming what I said... that publisher is
>treated as an element, but the "roles" are not.
Correct.
>Not having seen the
>chapters you refer to (anxiously awaiting their unveiling today!)
As are we all! On the other hand, earlier versions of these chapters
were issued in December 2007 (but I was citing the current versions).
>I'm not sure how the roles are treated -- whether they can be interpreted
>as elements in their own right, like publisher, or not. In other
>words, could you make a logical list of relationships that has:
>
>creator
>illustrator
>publisher
>translator
>
>even though some of these may be seen as more "essential" in the
>bibliographic description, and others as somewhat secondary?
I can't give you a technical answer, but what you have done makes
sense to me. A logical list of valid relationships includes both the
relationship elements and the subordinate roles defined in the
Appendix. The listing and use of such a logical list (it seems to
me) is an implementation decision. We chose not to formally define
each role as an element sub-type of the relationship element (mainly
to avoid another volume of RDA text), but our understanding has
always been that the roles are in fact element sub-types. In the
registry, could you designate these as sub-types and indicate which
relationship elements they are subordinate to? That seems an ideal
solution to me.
One further distinction may be important: that between the
relationship (which RDA treats as the related entity -- related
person, related corporate body, related work, etc.) and the
relationship designator. Creator and publisher above are related
entities, while illustrator and translator are designations
associated with a related entity. In the case of creator and
publisher, no designation is necessary because the nature of the
relationships is inherent in the element. In practice, this
distinction is probably based on the "librarian's" view of the
anticipated data structure that you referred to in your previous message.
John Attig
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