On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 4:47 AM, Stephens, Owen
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Alistair,
>
> In Scenario 1, you say that 'publisher' is not defined in RDA Element
> Vocabulary. Is this not
> http://metadataregistry.org/schemaprop/show/id/93.html?

Owen, for reasons that are complex, there are two RDA schemas:
elements and roles. The roles terms came from a list that LoC created,
and does not include publisher. Publisher (and manufacturer) are
included in the RDA elements, while other roles like "illustrator" or
"editor" are in the list of roles. So we have an RDA-ism here that
needs to be worked out. I assume that Alistair was looking for
publisher in the list of roles, where it logically would be.

The RDA developers are clearly thinking in terms of today's records,
where you have a field for a personal name, and you can add the "role"
to that field. But you also have a field for the publication
information, and that has an element called publisher (not an element
for a corporate name with the role publisher). This means that there's
an inconsistency in how agents are treated in RDA. For compatibility
with RDF, we should treat all of the all of the roles as properties,
and allow the value to be either a person or a corporate entity. This,
however, is very different from how librarians think about their data.
In fact, the use of roles has diminished over recent decades, and
names are added to records without any roles being included, meaning
that there really is no "author" field, just a name field. It's not
that hard to find records (see: http://lccn.loc.gov/80008730) with an
author and a translator, and both are simply coded as a personal name.
The roles are only visible in the "statement of responsibility" that
follows the title, but that's a text field intended for the human
reader.

This is one of those areas of library cataloging that puzzles me. For
all of the precision of the rules, in the end we are very imprecise
about the relationships of creators to the works. I'm not at all sure
that we'll see library records using the roles as properties, and I
suspect that we'll need to define a generic "agent" property so that
we can create records that look like the ones in catalogs today.

kc

p.s. I know you asked a simple question... this is a rant I just had
to get out of my system.

>
>
> Owen Stephens
> Assistant Director: eStrategy and Information Resources
> Central Library
> Imperial College London
> South Kensington Campus
> London
> SW7 2AZ
>
> t: +44 (0)20 7594 8829
> e: [log in to unmask]
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: List for discussion on Resource Description and Access (RDA)
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alistair Miles
>> Sent: 12 November 2008 18:11
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: New analysis of RDA cataloguer scenarios 2 and 3; scenario 1
>> revised
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've just spend another day working on the RDA cataloguer scenarios,
>> here's what I've done.
>>
>> I reviewed and revised the RDF expression of scenario 1 in light of a
>> small number of changes to the RDA elements vocabulary since
>> 2008-10-11 (when I did the last revisition):
>>
>>   http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/Scenarios/1
>>
>> I created a first draft RDF expression of scenarios 2 and 3:
>>
>>   http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/Scenarios/2
>>   http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/Scenarios/3
>>
>> The analysis at the bottom of each of these pages checks that all
>> classes and properties used in the scenario are defined in either the
>> RDA Elements, RDA Roles or FRBR Core vocabularies. It also shows any
>> major issues for these vocabularies, e.g. where a property is required
>> but not defined somewhere -- the fact that there are very few of these
>> demonstrates that the vocabularies are sufficient to express the given
>> scenarios.
>>
>> Some further notes are at
>>
>>
>>
> http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/AlistairMiles/AnalysisNotes20081
>> 112
>>
>> I haven't gone through these new scenarios yet to try to
>> systematically capture issues that they raise, I think it's probably
>> better to work through the remaining cataloger scenarios (4, 5, 6)
>> then go through and do a systematic analysis, capturing issues in a
>> central place.
>>
>> That's all for now.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Alistair
>>
>> --
>> Alistair Miles
>> Senior Computing Officer
>> Image Bioinformatics Research Group
>> Department of Zoology
>> The Tinbergen Building
>> University of Oxford
>> South Parks Road
>> Oxford
>> OX1 3PS
>> United Kingdom
>> Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
>> Email: [log in to unmask]
>> Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993
>



-- 
--  ---
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
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ph.: 510-540-7596   skype: kcoylenet
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