I agree with Carl - I've been worried about this field
and Carl has now usefully analysed the basic flaw in DATE
Yes - it is a real pain to propose such a
major change to DC at this stage, but if it makes it
more useful, it will also make it more widespread,
so that is a GOOD THING. Most deployments will have used
DATE consistently for one or other of Carl's meanings, so
a global search-and-replace would allow local implementations
to be made conformant without too much grief.
As another example of how DATE is confusing: in earth and
environmental sciences and other disciplines with historical
content, DATE may also be expected refer to relevant historical
date to which the object is related. In DC this really belongs
in COVERAGE, but DC might be seen to allow such a use of
DATE through using suitable qualifiers, as would be permitted
under the Canberra scheme.
Temporal coverage may be elucidible from the
creation or entry date for some information (eg financial)
but certainly not in my discipline. (It is also rather
quaint to try to encode "mid-proterozoic", or worse still
"older than foo", in ISO format ;-) )
It seems to me to be a BAD THING to have ambiguity like this
in terms of "which DC element does this information belong in?",
particularly for inexperienced cataloguers and I think Carl's
explanation gives the underlying reason why this will occur for DATE.
TITLE, SUBJECT COVERAGE and DESCRIPTION provide homes for
abstracted content, and I think that users should be
clearly discouraged from putting abstract information elsewhere.
As well as the reasons he discussed, Carl's replacements for
DATE might also short-circuit this abstracting problem.
(I would like to see these elements grouped together in the
standard DC element listing to make this quite clear:
perhaps other logical groups of elements also exist,
{IDENTIFIER}
{TITLE, SUBJECT, COVERAGE, DESCRIPTION}
{CREATOR, CONTRIBUTORS, PUBLISHER, (CREATION_|ENTRY_)DATE, RIGHTS}
{TYPE, FORMAT, SOURCE, LANGUAGE, RELATION}
may be logical groups ...?)
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__________________________________________________
Dr Simon Cox - Australian Geodynamics Cooperative Research Centre
CSIRO Exploration & Mining, PO Box 437, Nedlands, WA 6009 Australia
T: +61 8 9389 8421 F: +61 8 9389 1906 [log in to unmask]
http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/SimonCox
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