James Weinheimer wrote:
> A more interesting question is: why is the uniform title there at all?
> It is designed to bring all versions of a title together: in this case,
> it's there because the title of the book is "The Adventures of
> Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's comrade)". This is an interesting case in
> point.
...
> The uniform title came up when I searched the Name Authority File. It
> states that all versions of this intellectual work must have the title:
> "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" somewhere in the record.
So as long as "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is in the title
somewhere, you're in the clear, right? Isn't that enough specialisation
for DC? How many resources are going to be covered by DC that aren't
going to be covered by specialist databases?
If I was looking for stuff about Huckleberry Finn, I'd most likely start
looking for anything dealing with "Huck Finn" or "Huckleberry Finn". I
don't care whether there are other words in the title or not. Of course,
in this case I'd be right royally lost if I was looking for stuff about
"Tom Sawyer", unless someone was consciencious enough to put the
complete title in as "{The} Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's
Comrade)". Not that I'd advocate the introduction of the concept of "non
filing characters" to DC, since DC is not supposed to be a catalog or a
filing system.
> > Does it *really* matter if one person says "Huckleberry Finn" has 480 pages, and
> > another says it has 398?
>
> If it doesn't have the same number of pages, would you say that it is
> the same text? To decide that somebody doesn't care whether it is or not
> may be satisfactory for a public library, but certainly not for
> Princeton's faculty members.
So the specialist information is only of interest to specialists who
know to look in a specialist database? While generic resource
*discovery* information is suitable for Jo average who's just looking
for stuff about Huck Finn?
How interesting. Sounds like DC has a future after all. The more rules
you put into how things are cataloged, and the more fields you add for
data to be entered in (eg: Uniform Title, Title, Subtitle, Alternate
Title, Marshmallow Title, Ridiculously Named Title), the easier it is to
lose resources to a badly formed search. DC has the advantage of having
only one title that can be a repeated field, rather than many
specialisations of Title.
Once you've discovered various resources are available, then you can go
to a specialist database for specialist information about it. Don't try
to turn DC into MARC, otherwise you'll have two MARC standards and no
DC. DC should be about "this resource exists", not "this resource is the
exact instance of the document you happen to be looking for". If you
*knew* you were looking for a specific copy of a specific text, why
aren't you looking at a specialist catalog in the first place?
Alex
--
Alex Satrapa
tSA Consulting Group Pty Ltd.
Canberra, Australia
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|