Having the top-level list (Document, Image, Sound, etc. - whatevery we determine
that short list to be) constitute the list of Types is the best way to go on
this for a couple of reasons:
a. One of the underlying concepts of DC is to keep it straightforward and easy
to apply. Brief lists of values are important here. Have this short list be
the default. Anyone who is part of a specialized community and who needs to use
the terms from a list developed by that community should be able to do so, just
qualifying the field with the name of the list used.
b. There has over the past, say, ten years been considerable activity in
developing form/genre lists by and for various disciplines. See, for example,
the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (available through the Getty's homepage). It
is appropriate to depend on the disciplines/areas to supply their own detailed
form/genre lists.
As it happens, the whole matter of form/genre has for whatever reason become
fashionable in the library cataloging world; again for example, the
spatial-data-cataloging world has had a committee working on genre terms for
geospatial data for about a year. The final report will be coming out within a
few months. The computer-files group has apparently also been working on a
form/genre list. And so on.
Mary Larsgaard
Alexandria Digital Library
UCSB
|