From: Peter Graham, Rutgers University Libraries
I won't be at Helsinki so will stick my 2 cents in now on Carl's DATE
message. I agree with the thrust of most of what he says with one exception:
>...less ambiguous than starting to talk about "put in its current form", or
"issued", or "last modified", .....<
Those of us in the RLG metawg task force specifically suggested "issued" as a
term because it is a term that is considered and has a history; it is a
superset of "published", by the way. Carl is trying to identify a
characteristic of the *work* rather than of its *form*, and our library
experience is that that is of less help to the user.
Asking as Carl is proposing for works of a time period leads to a swamp of
definitions. When was Lear written? We don't know, and in fact we now have
two dates, because it's now clear there are two versions. When was
Beowulf written? The work doesn't exist in abstract form, it exists
in manifestations which are distinct from each other; the Shakespeare
1623 manifestation is different from the 18C Johnson edition which is
different from the 1980s Wells edition. Making the DC a vehicle for
deep subject understanding of a topic will only cause problems for the
metadata creator and not significantly help the user. "Issued" is a
carefully chosen term and I know Lynn Marko, to be at Helsinki, will
be able to discuss this even more fully and adequately.
All else Carl is getting at I support strongly. Enjoy the Herring
Festival (you didn't know that was on next week?). --pg
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