James Weinheimer wrote:
> 
> Alex Satrapa wrote:
> 
> > <META NAME="DC.Title" LANG="la" CONTENT="Imitatio Christi">
> > <META NAME="DC.Title" LANG="en" CONTENT="Imitation of Christ">
> > etc
> > <META NAME="DC.Language" CONTENT="en">
> 
> I personally do not understand this. I'll admit that there is a Latin
> title (we can always throw in an extra title) but as a user, I do not
> understand what this title means in relation to the document I'm looking
> at.

If the user is english-speaking, you'd show them the english title, and
possibly the latin title. If the user is french-speaking, you'd show
them the french title. In this case, there is no french title, so I'd
show them the latin one.

> The words "Imitatio Christi" do not exist in the resource. It is
> something that must be created by the metadata-cataloger. For the user
> to understand what he/she is looking at, should this title be labelled
> in a special manner?

No special labelling, please! Ick. We're not trying to re-create MARC.
If you want a handful of different title fields to pick from, use MARC.

I don't think the user should ever be shown the raw metadata. The
discovery engine would process it some way and show the user something
that makes sense in the context of the discovery engine.

> ...Would we
> handle a French translation of the second book of the Iliad in the same
> way?

I'd wing it like this:

DC.Title = "Iliad (Vol 2)" <-- someone know what this really is?
DC.Creator = "Homer"                  <-- NOT Simpson
DC.Contributor = "<name of the translator>"
DC.Language = "fr"
DC.Source = "Iliad (Vol 2)"
DC.Relation = IsPartOf "Iliad"


> The idea of corporate authorship has a very long history. You can read
> it in "Corporate authorship" by Michael Carpenter. Suffice it to say
> that, if you did that in our library catalog, you'd get in trouble.

Wow. There's a whole book on one of the rules you guys follow to get the
arcane values to stick in your MARC database fields/subfields.

Do you know many people who've actually read that book, and are still
sane?  :)

Why can't we stick to something simple like... if the book was written
by a number of people, list their names. If the book was written by a
company, list the company. If two authors wrote a book together, list
their names. If the two authors happened to be a company, writing as the
company (rather than just as the two authors), then list the company.
Are there any cases where it doesn't make sense to do so? I'm talking
about the minimal-ruleset environment of DC, not the
7-volumes-of-AACR-and-specialist-books-on-extreme-cases ruleset of MARC.

Corporate Authorship sounds to me like one of those things that are nice
for encoding special information about the way a book was written, but
at the same time it's one of those things that makes a library catalog a
pain in the neck to create, maintain, and understand.

> > Well... a person can't be a corporate body. A person can (in Australia
> > at least) be a sole trader (in which case, they trade as John Doe, Sole
> > Trader). Maybe I've missed something?
> 
> What about the "President of the United States" instead of Bill Clinton?

"The President of the United States of America" is still the name of a
person, or a company, or a role, isn't it? You could be really thorough
and list Bill Clinton too. Just because you have special rules for
encoding that kind of information into MARC, doesn't mean we have to
make up new rules for DC (or inherit rules from MARC).

> There are many instances when works made in an official capacity are not
> the same as personal utterances.

I agree - indicate that the creator was a "role" rather than a "person",
by putting in the name of the role, perhaps complemented with the "real"
name of the person behind the role.

Regards
Alex

-- 
Alex Satrapa
tSA Consulting Group Pty Ltd.
Canberra, Australia


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