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On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Alex Satrapa wrote: > In one paragraph or less, can anyone describe what advantage I would > find in describing a resource with: > > DC.Creator = "John and Debra Doe (firm)" > > as opposed to > > DC.Creator = "Doe, John" > DC.Creator = "Doe, Debra" Identifying an author as a 'person' allows software to enable more accurate retrieval e.g. a searcher can say they want 'London' as a personal name rather than as a word ocurring in an organisation's name (The London School of Economics). Of course not all software will have this facility but the intention is to allow for it. Also distinguishing personal from corporate names is helpful when manipulating DC in conjunction with legacy metadata (such as the various MARCs) as it enables more accurate mapping. It can be useful for metadata display purposes too i.e. more helpful display layout for user. This was discussed on the dc-datamodels list some time back. See one instance of the thread at http://mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-datamodel/1998-02/0103.html I managed to convince Misha that the distinction was useful then, please don't make me do it again :-) Rachel --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rachel Heery UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) University of Bath tel: +44 (0)1225 826724 Bath, BA2 7AY, UK fax: +44 (0)1225 826838 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%