[A bookseller's view.]
Rebecca Lasher writes:
| I agree with Paul Miller that the AUTHOR should be separate
| and the PUBLISHER and OTHER-AGENT consolidated. Most
| publisher fields are not indexed in library catalogs, author
| fields are always indexed.
That's a good argument, but it holds true only for library
catalogues, and raises the question of intended use of this
information.
The library catalogue user is likely to be limited to the books
actually in the library. He can discover the identity of
the publisher (usually) by consulting the entries (cards) for the work
s.v. Author, Title, or Subject (the indices offered by the
catalogue).
A bookseller's catalogue is much more likely to indicate
the publisher (in part because the quality of the object to
which the intellectual work is bound may vary with the publisher).
A buyer, or someone wishing to obtain information on the
Internet, may wish to be able to discriminate between "the same"
object as published by various publishers (e.g., because he
has different commercial arrangements with different publishers).
For this user the DC info set plays the role of the library catalogue
card.
So I think that Publisher merits its own field not only because
it is sensibly different from Editor, Illustrator, and other
things likely to fall into OtherAgent (the language of the June 1995
DC report,
http://www.oclc.org:5046/oclc/research/conferences/
metadata/dublin_core_report.html
makes a very clear distinction between intellectual contribution and
distribution) but also because it is a traditional piece of publication
metadata that is actually used (whether or not it is indexed) and is
likely to be useful on the Internet.
If it is decided to do without Publisher as a separate field,
I'd prefer eliminate it entirely from DC rather than conflate it
with OtherAgent; it might then be considered part of a set of
"circumstances of access and use" metadata not covered by DC (including
price, hours of availability, etc.).
Regards,
Terry Allen Fujitsu Software Corp. [log in to unmask]
"In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build,
which we soon find outselves obliged to destroy?" - Benjamin Franklin
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