Lou, I am not given to unprovoked agreement with you, but here I feel
provoked:
1. I support the collapse of the creator and contributor field into one
The term 'Responsiblility' (or responsible) is preferable to 'Agent'. An
agent acts on behalf of someone/thing. What is needed here is attribution
of the persons/organisation for the work in question. I believe that is
the use made in (intelligent) software agents.
This is not a new issue in descriptive metadata, and the library world
(AACR) uses the term 'responsibility' in a useful (and successful) way.
2. I hestitate about the bundling of the publisher field into the
'responsibility' field
The act of publishing is special, and not at all the same as
creation/authorship. Publishers add to the process but do not assume the
rights of authors. This field is required in descriptive metadata to help
someone who wishes to acquire the work or some rights associated with the
work.
The publication area (field) also embraces dissemination. To disseminate
is to part of the act of publication. If an author publishes his/her own
work then s/he is (additionally) acting as publisher - but the roles are
distinct.
This 'publication' area is also a place for terms of availability. Indeed
the area is about availability. And, a given work can be made available
(be published) in several ways - without necessarily changing the
'responsibility' for the work. [were it to do so, then there would be
cause to consider that a new work existed, for which there was additional
responsibility.]
3. When these issues were discussed as part of the the UK Computer Files
Cataloguing Group, back in 1987 before we had the benefit of calling the
fields metadata, we bundled the set of fields discussed above into
'Identification & Availability'. We recognised that the AACR world had
done a reasonable job in that area, although it didnt have the magical
'relation' field for defining the identification of works.
[Incidentally, the other areas were 'Subject & Content', which also
included fields concerning how the work had come about as well as what it
was about, 'Characteristics of the Media', and 'Management & Access', the
latter being a bit of a collect-all field. Later some of us also came to
realise that it might be useful to have 'Archival responsibility' as an
additional, and perhaps mandatory, field in which each and every
person/holding a copy of the work could state either what they done about
ensuring an archival copy or point to the organisation that had such.
And so it goes .. ]
4. While I am on the subject of identification, please note that the
Directors of ISSN centres have been discussing a redefinition of
'seriality', to 'ongoing publication'. This should assist the progressive
use of the ISSN numbering infrastructure for (digital) information objects
of appropriate granularity.
best wishes
Peter
On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, The Laptop at Burnard Towers wrote:
> At 17:51 23/10/98 -0700, Liz Parrott wrote:
> >
> >I'm a programmer in Silicon Valley. Here "agent" means something very
> >specific. It means a process a user creates to carry out a request either once
> >or at regular intervals or under specific conditions. Sometimes it's called an
> >intelligent agent. It's not unlike a Dialog Alert.
>
> I's say that it's usually only a good idea to appropriate specialist
> terminology like this when you can be fairly sure that there won't be any
> kind of interference effect between the two fields of discourse concerned,
> i.e. in this case, if those for whom an agent is a piece of software are
> unlikely to have to deal with those for whom an agent is a category of
> information. It seems to me highly unlikely that these sets of language
> users are disjoint, as witness Ms Parrott's interesting comment cited above.
>
> Without wishing to take sides on whether or not Bearman's proposal is a good
> one, I'd strongly support renaming the proposed unified field to avoid this
> confusion. Far better, in my view, to appropriate a term from the library
> community, where most of these categories seem equivalent to the AACR
> concept of "statement of responsibility". So why not call this field
> "Responsible"?
>
> (anyone who spots in this an attempt to get the TEI Header's <respStmt>
> into the Dublin core, is dead right)
>
> Lou Burnard
> >From the Laptop at Burnard Towers
>
>
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