I agree with Simon that there is no downside, really, and in fact the
library community was much in favor of this extension. USMARC, our legacy
standard, has in fact gone from the other direction--from physical objects
to virtual ones, with only a few stretch marks to show for it.
There are practical questions that need to be addressed for each "stretch"
of the existing model, but as Simon illustrates, with the proper frame of
mind it can be done quite elegantly. Far knottier, in my opinion, is the
task of translating existing information en masse from one format to the
other, given the variants we know about (much less the ones we don't).
Back in the days when I used to teach cataloging, I used to tell my
students that they could catalog the contents of anyone's grocery cart,
once they got the hang of it. I still believe that, though *real*
catalogers, being the rule-based animals that they are, put innumerable
barriers up around what is essentially a creative process.
Diane
>[log in to unmask] wrote:
>>
>> What's the down side of letting DC point to off-line resources (i.e.
>> resources that aren't digitized)
>
>There is no real downside.
>Here's an extended example
>(based on data that I have to hand ...)
>
[snip Simon's lovely examples ...]
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