Stina Degerstedt wrote:
> I have a question concerning the DATE RANGE: I voted for it as a qualifier
> and I was surprised that it did not pass the vote. How do the rest of you
> look upon this, is DATE RANGE important or not?
I consider date range absolutely essential, and I am rather shocked that it
didn't pass. It is such a simple way to distinguish people with common names
e.g. Johnson, Barbara. In a library, dates are taken for granted and the issue
doesn't even need to be discussed.
This is an example of how I believe library interests are being ignored, and
will eventually force librarians to forego use of DC, or at least major parts
of it.
It's interesting to compare the development of DC with the development of MARC.
With MARC, there was agreement on the vast majority of points: the cataloging
rules. (At least within the US)
The question was: how can we encode this information in the best way?
With DC, there is no agreement on much of anything.
In library practice, there are two questions:
1) how can searchers best find items? And once this is decided:
2) how can we best encode this?
In DC, these two questions have been conflated into a single, rather amorphous
question, and the results are predictably rather strange.
Returning to dates, the question should now be: dates have played an essential
role in catalogs for various reasons. If DCMI doesn't want to include dates,
what do they propose to take their place?
James Weinheimer
Princeton University
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