G. Hannemyr has very aptly summed up the concerns I have secretly (or not
always so secretly) harbored for a while.
It is quite possible that meanwhile the sum total of (unofficial) qualifiers
out there is bigger than a decent adaptation of MARC would be, but a
lot less expressive and precise and simply not manageable for someone who
should try to make the best use of stuff they harvest from the world over.
Indeed, people seem to think (even programmers?) that there must be some
sort of magic which will eventually sort it all out.
Will "Qualified DC" be that magic? Will it offer ways and means to transform
unofficial qualifiers into official ones? Surely not automagically, but
with some assistance?
What bothers me even more is that designers, even when they think up all
kinds of tags, seem to totally neglect the content. Names, esp., require
a good few rules to make them reliable and consistent. Yet not even the
basic "last name, first name" rule seems to be established. If DC doesn't
want to get mixed up with cataloging rules, the documentation should at
least point out very clearly that without such the potential of your
data will be questionable. The more so the bigger the volume.
Semantics and syntax is not the whole story. Let there be a warning sticker
for this too.
>
> To me, random and free form qualifiers do not make sense in the context
> of the Internet. They may make a lot of sense within the closed confines
> of an intranet (i.e. within a group who among themselves are able agree
> about what qualifiers to use, and what their meaning are), but as the
> _Internet_ draft reads, the fact that qualifiers are lesser animals
> than the 15 core properties that is named in RFC2413 is not communicated
> to the reader at all.
>
Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel. +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX -5836
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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