Alex Satrapa touches a sore spot of AACR when asking,
>
> 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"?
>
The article is left out because MARC, in its field for the uniform title,
has no provision to indicate the leading article, i.e. to direct sorting
software to skip it. That this deficiency of the format has crept into
the rules is regrettable. There is a proposal under way in the MARC community
to remedy this:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marbi/1998/98-16r.html
Alex also asks:
> Does it *really* matter if one person says "Huckleberry Finn" has 480 pages, and
> another says it has 398?
>
Not normally. Only with old books it *may* matter to distinguish between
editions. But it *may* matter a lot if you use the number of pages in
a process of "deduping" (discovery of duplicate entries) in large databases.
This is the single most vexing problem and obstacle to interoperability
between library systems, and the reason behind many rules that seem as
if they couldn't really matter. In small data bases, many rules do not
at once make sense, but we've been dealing with large ones even before
computers came, hence all this stuff has long been with us.
> 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"?
>
See above.
> 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 ..."?
>
They apply to the initial article in general, and AACR contains an appendix
list of all words occurring as articles in many languages.
> 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.
>
The list is the Library of Congress Name Authority File, and the maintaining
agency is LC, assisted my major reseach libraries.
Let me add, and thanks for your patience, that in the 60s and 70s there
have been many libraries rigging up supposedly sensible, non-MARC solutions
with lots of simplifications. They've all lived to regret it...
Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel. +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX -5836
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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