Yes, contact information is important - but it's of no use unless it's current.
Storing the street address of a major publisher is pointless, unless you *know*
that they're never going to grow bigger or smaller, and end up moving down the
street or across the country.
Storing the email address of the author of a magazine article is pointless,
unless you *know* that said author will always work for the same educational
institution, or will *always* use the same ISP.
The "best" place (I use that term with reservation) to store contact information
for an author in a DC system, is in the DC Metadata about the author. Perhaps we
may decide that a suitable kludge is to store contact information in (the
metadata for?) a biographic article. This biographic article could be an "web
accessible autobiographic notation" (aka Home Page), containing the usual
information such as birth date, employment history, work history,
qualifications, contact details (phone, fax, postal mail, telex, etc) ad
nauseum.
Alternately, for dead people like Elvis Presley, you could reference a "web
accessible authoritative bibliographic reference" - say, The (fictional)
Gracelands Institute of Anglo-American Cultural History's web page on Elvis.
Of course, I've just opened up a new can of worms - what happens when the GIAACH
moves from http://www.giaach.edu to http://www.giaach.com? It is (IMHO) easier
to update a repository based on "replace all www.giaach.edu with www.giaach.com"
rather than "replace any of these five email addresses with this one".
Just IMHO
Alex
Markus Klink wrote:
> As an participant in an online library project I can tell from my
> experience that contact details are exactly the kind of information
> people desire once they had access to the resource. Collecting them and
> making them available to others is an essential part of our work and
> therefore we rely on the possibility to provide users with contact
> details.
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