On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Stu Weibel wrote:
> Here all this time I thought that DESCRIPTION was BETTER than SUBJECT
> because it was in use elsewhere for roughly the same purpose.
I (and a few others I believe!) promoted inclusion of a description
element, mainly because most internet search services try to include some
sort of free text description/abstract; and certainly all subject services
using ROADS include descriptions in their records.
My proposal was that there would be a description as well as a subject
element. As part of the last summary/compromise round it was suggested
that Description would incorporate Subject which could be used as a
qualifier. That seemed OK to me ...... but what I really wanted was a
separate element, now you mention it (again).
I think the important thing is to be able to distinguish a 'hand-crafted'
description if it exists, as opposed to keywords, just because its so
useful for display purposes. For that reason it doesn't seem a good idea
to bury it away within another element.
Rachel
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rachel Heery, Metadata Projects Co-ordinator
UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking)
University of Bath tel: +44 (0)1225 826724
Bath, BA2 7AY, UK fax; +44 (0)1225 826838
Information on ROADS: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/
DESIRE: http://www.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire
|