"Publisher" is a role that is quite different from that of Author, and equally
to the point in this case is that non-librarians (in my about 25 years of
experience answering reference questions by non-librarians) have no difficulty
telling the difference. One might chose to call it something different, such as
"Issuing body" - just don't collapse it into Author.
Roles given as examples for "Other-Agent" are not like "Publisher", at least
what I've read is not; "Other-Agent" is actually closer to "Author." For the
sake of clarity, it's better to keep the 3 separate.
For those concerned that the current # of elements is too many and should be
pared down - it's been my experience that persons say there are too many fields
to fill in for metadata UNTIL said persons actually start filling in the fields
- then somehow there are always too few .... It's amazing the number of persons
who get sucked into using USMARC because of that!
Mary Larsgaard
UCSB
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