So far, I've seen a number of people providing
examples of stuff that might be categorised as an
"event":
- The use of a particular (catalogable) object
by a particular (biographied) person
- A discussion between any number of people,
recorded (or not) by some means - eg an IRC
log, or a video-conference recording or snapshot.
- An organised exhibition, involving demonstrators,
judges, spectators and facilitators
The list could be endless.
Rebecca S. Guenther contributed:
"In the library world we are used to using
authority records to provide control for
the use of certain headings which fall
under the category of "event" (conferences,
meetings, etc.)."
Now rather than continue the unfortunate phrase
"document-like object", would it be suitable to use
"tangible record"? This should get us away from the
paper-based mentality that our society appears to
have inflicted upon itself :)
As for the subject of my message... when we have an
event which is "important" (to someone), would we be
able to create an event-surrogate which is merely
a DC-style record containing the details of
relevance to the event being recorded? Is this what
librarians/catalogers mean by an "authority record"?
If we can come to some agreement that an Event
Authority Record can be a "type" (in the DC.Type
context), then there's room to discuss this issue
further. Otherwise we'll have stopped it dead in the
water.
I can see one side of the argument being that an
event is a non-tangible resource. Once it's happened,
it's gone. You can't record a conversation that took
place five minutes ago - except by eyewitness account
(or is that earwitness account?). Even then the
recording is just that - a recording. So the only way
we can ever "catalog" an event is by evidence found
in other records.
The other side would be - if we have the evidence,
why not track it from one record, the event
surrogate, which contains the information required to
uniquely identify the event itself. All other
metadata would provide the location/description of
the detailed evidence of that event. The event
surrogate (authority record?) would exist soley to
provide core information on the event, and provide
an anchor for other resources to bind to.
The "event authority record" would be almost like the
typical person's home-page - not much content, but
heaps of links to stuff of interest to that person
(in this case, heaps of links to stuff of relevance
to that event).
I'll stop there before I bore you all to tears...
-Alex Satrapa
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