Alex Satrapa wrote:
> Anthony Finkelstein wrote:
> > 7. if I make a resource available am I the publisher?
> Apparently because publishing a work on a Web site costs nothing
> (besides your effort, hard drive space and your internet connection),
> you're not really publishing that work.
>
>
> But seriously, I'd consider that listing someone as a publisher only
> means that that person has given some authority to that work by
> presenting it to the public for consumption. Some people do have
> difficulty accepting publishing on the Internet as "real" publishing
> because there is no editorial or peer review, as there would be for a
> document in a scientific journal or newspaper - regardless of your
> status in presenting the work (eg: what's the difference between UCL
> presenting a work on their web site, and Jo Schmoe presenting a work on
> his web site?)
I think Alex said this well. In "librarian-speak" there are differences among
"publisher" "printer" and "distributor". To put it succinctly, "publisher" has
something to do with intellectual content, "printer" with the physical object, and
"distributor" with marketing rights. Of course, these functions can be rolled into
one.
There are vanity publishers which amount to little more than printers (the author
pays all costs for his book to be "published" along with any advertising, etc.). In
the catalog, we handle these as "publishers." So, in your example, there is little
choice but to put "University College London" as publisher.
Unfortunately, the rule is not quite so clear:
"The intent of specifying this field is to identify the entity that provides access
to the resource. If the Creator and Publisher are the same, do not repeat the name
in the Publisher area. If the nature of the responsibility is ambiguous, the
recommended practice is to use Publisher for organizations, and Creator for
individuals. In cases of lesser responsibility, other than creation, use
Contributor."
According to this rule, we are supposed to conflate Creator and Publisher in certain
instances. Therefore, if you decided that the creator of your site were "University
College London" (e.g. a college catalog) and it were also the publisher (i.e. it is
located on the UCL server), you cannot use the name in <DC.Publisher>.
It is also unclear whether we are supposed to repeat an organization in
<DC.Publisher> if we also use it in <DC.Contributor>. The idea of playing down
corporate authorship is worrying to some of us in the field, e.g. preferring
"Publisher" to "Creator") There are also indexing concerns.
This is the way catalogers read rules (I'm sure I haven't found everything hidden in
this supposedly simple rule!) Maybe we're inbred, I don't know--but we are forced to
read and interpret rules very exactly.
Jim Weinheimer
Princeton University
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