At 11:01 AM 4/29/99 +1000, Alex Satrapa wrote:
>In MARC, every time you catalog a new item, you have to make the
>decisions about "do I put the title in this field or that field? Who's
>the primary author? Do I classify it under subject X or Y?"
Nope, not true. These decisions have nothing to do with MARC. There are
actually two questions conflated here: how do I catalog, and then how do I
encode the cataloging. MARC only addresses the latter: encoding the
cataloging decisions. And it's usually pretty straightforward. The
difficult decisions, like who is the primary author, are made before MARC
is invoked, and they are the same decisions that were made for library
catalogs before they were machine-readable.
Let me suppose that I have a community whose data is maps and whose
metadata is information about those maps. The decision about "what's the
longitude?" is made regardless of the metadata; what the metadata has to do
is provide a place to put that data that facilitates retrieval.
Unfortunately, in DC we seem to be trying to come up with the metadata
format for a community that has no agreement on the metadata contents. I
think that the basic DC simple set was an attempt to define the contents,
but we slip back and forth between structure (dot notation, rdf) and
contents (title, creator) without distinguishing well between them and
their functions.
kc
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.kcoyle.net 510/987-0567
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