I'm not saying to throw out all the rules "just because". I'd *like* to be able to
cut down the AACR to 15 pages. I'm saying we should throw out or simplify the rules
that add too much complexity. Ideally, we could do away with all the special cases
like (the fictional) "title is the name printed on the front of the book unless the
work is a left-handed time paradox presentation on orange laminex in which case title
is combined from the first fifteen mathematical symbols the cataloger sees in their
immediate temporal context."
Why, for example, does the book James used in his example have the uniform title
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" rather than "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"?
Does it *really* matter if one person says "Huckleberry Finn" has 480 pages, and
another says it has 398?
Does it *really* matter if one person calls it "Huckleberry Finn" and another calls it
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer's Comrade"? What about "The Mona Lisa"
vs. "Mona Lisa"?
Is there a clear, concise answer we can come up with, that can be applied with a broad
brush to every work that might be allocated DC Metadata? For example, do the same
rules that apply to "The ..." also apply to "An ..."?
As for the author's date of birth/death, or aliases, is there any recognised authority
for maintaining a list of aliases? Or are researchers just expected to "know"? The
immediate alternative is one alias or "best known name" in DC.Creator/DC.Contributor,
with a DC.Relation link to the creator/contributor bibliographies (which, being
resources themselves have their own metadata)... but I digress.
Alex
James Weinheimer wrote:
> Alex Satrapa wrote:
> > At this stage, it seems to me to be a simple thing to ignore all the
> > specialisations and special cases inherent in the AACR rules.
>
> Yes, we can throw out all of our rules, etc. and start from scratch, but
> we'll only start looking for new rules again, when the cataloger (either
> professional cataloger or creator) asks, "What in the world do I do with
> this?" They'll start looking for examples of how others did it.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|