At 08:29 PM 11/5/98 -0500, J. Trant wrote:
>
>The way I see it, 1:1 is just a case of describing the 'object in hand'.
>And since there isn't a way of linking repeating elements in DC, it is also
>the only way to ensure that records make logical sense.
>
It's kind of hard to talk about the "object in hand" in the digital
environment; it's not even that easy to talk about it in the hardcopy
world. Essentially, your "unit", whether you call it *the work* or *the
object in hand* or whatever, is quite contextual.
For example, if you are a music cataloger, the physical object is a music
CD, but it often consists of distinct intellectual objects -- three sonatas
by three different composers. In this case, the item in hand isn't a work,
although it is a single package, albeit without a great deal of
intellectual cohesion and none that links to authorship. What do you
catalog? The CD? The sonatas? Both? (Yes, all of the above, sometimes, but
not always.) If you are an archivist, your "unit" is often an archive: The
Mark Twain Papers, all 47 boxes of them. If you are a serials cataloger,
your unit is a series, not the individual works in a series. If you are a
preservation librarian, the unit may be a hierarchy of copies, from the
preservation master to a cascading series of copies and copies of copies,
each of which has a different use.
So the first thing that we have to concede is that the "1" that represents
the work in the "1:1" is highly variable, and that different communities
have different definitions for the unit with which they work. We can't
force them into an artificial atomization of their world; what they do
makes sense within their context.
Some communities work expressly with hierarchies, and this is true for the
archival community and for the preservation community. Individual items
within archives are not described outside of the context of the archive,
but are always contained within it. An example of this is the large store
of "Finding Aids" that the archival community is developing using SGML (and
some XML). If we don't allow hierarchy within the DC record, then
essentially we are telling this community that they can't use the DC
standard.
I think it would be better to develop a standard that mimics real world
work, with its centuries of experience, than to insist on a theoretically
"neat" solution that doesn't meet people's needs.
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.dla.ucop.edu/~kec
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