May I wade into this discussion?
There seems to be a general amount of confusion about describing these
"events". We need to keep in mind that we are describing objects and not the
events, themselves. There may be various objects (web pages, books, images,
maps, etc.) concerning an event, e.g. the festival in Texas where people sit
around and tell tall tales.
No matter how much we may want to place the event itself into our description,
we cannot. We are stuck with describing the objects which deal with the story
telling festival in Texas.
The purpose of Metadata, as I understand it, is to allow users to find the
objects associated with this festival, not to somehow get into an abstract
description of the event.
Looking at it in this way, from a cataloging point of view, the question of
"events" becomes an authorities question: what is the authorized form of the
heading to be included in all records which deal with the event? In this case,
the form is: "Texas Storytelling Festival". Any book, serial, webpage, image,
etc. that deals with this event must use precisely these words in their
records. Subsequently, when users find one item dealing with this event, they
can see the heading and find everything else on it.
Jim Weinheimer
Princeton University
[log in to unmask]
Paul Miller wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Jul,Erik wrote:
>
> > Simon: I'm sorry, I'm not following your logic. Would you please
> > explain, in the instance of an "event," exactly what the metadata is
> > pointing to? When the event has passed, what is there that the metadata
> > can reference? Please explain this in terms of the 1:1 principle?
>
> The notion of creating metadata for an event in isolation is perhaps, in
> most cases, not sensible. Where that event is in effect a focal point
> around which a large number of other resources are grouped (various
> recordings as surrogates of a live performance 'event', the transformation
> of a building over time through various change of use 'events', etc.) it
> becomes more obvious; the intangible 'event' is required in order to give
> the surrogates meaning.
>
> In many ways, this appears a logical fulfilment of the 1:1 model, rather
> than any attempt to stretch it.
>
> > If the event is recorded, then is it not the *recording* that is
> > described by the metadata?
>
> No. If an event is recorded (me making a video recording of Stu speaking
> at a conference), then the recording is a resource in its own right. That
> resource is also a surrogate of the 'event'; Stu speaking at the
> conference, and/or the conference itself. For those who just love creating
> metadata records, you could presumably EVEN consider another event here;
> the RECORDING event, which occurs within the time frame delimited by the
> conference event.
>
> Paul
>
> == dr. paul miller ============== [log in to unmask] ==
> collections manager, archaeology data service, king's manor
> york, YO1 7EP, UK tel: +44 (0)1904 43 3954
> == http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ ========= fax: +44 (0)1904 43 3939 ==
|