At 08:53 AM 2/4/99 -0600, Gary E. Masters wrote:
>How about different levels of reality? One for Adams and one for the
>mountain. Perhaps one is doing a search for photographers, then the Adams
>level of reality is valid. Or one is trying to match photographs of
>mountains with a map. Then the mountain level works. This seems to be in
>line with what elements and sorts (or search) can accomplish. However, as
>a new student of DC, I wait for review by others.
"Classic" library cataloging manages this quite easily by giving subject
headings to the work. So a library catalog record is metadata for a work.
The subject of the work might be a mountain, and that goes into the "topic"
field. There's no ambiguity between the mountain and the photograph as far
as the metadata is concerned, and I don't see why it is a problem for DC
metadata.
The question isn't whether we are supposed to be cataloging the mountain,
the photograph or the .gif of the photograph. I don't think that DC has to
make that decision. It does have to accommodate structurally the metadata
that people want to create, and some people will want all of that
information in a single piece of metadata because they consider the
combination of those pieces of information to be the true representation of
the item, not the separation of them.
kc
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.dla.ucop.edu/~kec
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