Tables of content

While time travelling on this list I noticed a discussion on how to
encode tables of content in MARC records to support controlled access to
authors of the listed parts. I've been mulling over this issue for some
time in relation to our still image and audio digitisation projects.
When it comes to describing parts that have their own bibliographic
integrity I don't think trying to put this data in a note field is the
way to go.

In our new generation catalogues, why don't we throw tables of contents
in records away, start giving parts of things their own records and
express parent-child relationships in forms that enable users to
navigate up and down bibliographic hierarchies and that enable the
generation of tables of content dynamically in displays of the parent
record.

Why not encode and share tables of content and other lists in a form
that can be used to spawn child records that inherit parent details in
the appropriate fields and not bother storing this information in the
parent record at all.

This would make us look more closely at the information that needs to be
stored in the child record and the information that can be inherited
from the parent to create a full bibliographic citation.

It would also make us look at ways of making the encoded relationship
persistent when metadata is shipped to other places - union catalogues,
federated metadata repositories, Google. Blogs, bibliographies.

And it would make us look at ways of encoding the bibliographic citation
so that the content inherited from the parent is not lost on export and
the relationships can be fully exploited in the new context. I know
OpenURL and the DC Citation working group have been working on this
problem.

This thinking can be extended to manuscript and archive collections,
where we tend to treat the finding aid as a table of contents to the
whole collection. When a whole collection (or an item in a collection)
is digitised, there's a need to support component level searching and
bibliographic citation.

(How to handle parent-child relationships consistently and in a
user-friendly way is still a real issue in our own production systems.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3769891 is the best we can do with Voyager.
Nuff said.

http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an40661746 is the same record in the
Australian union catalogue. The direct parent-child relationship is lost
because it was invoked by a local system number. The relationship has
been expressed as a series, which is certainly not FRBR correct and the
link retrieves all the bibliographic records with the same series
authority, not the parent record.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms9803-1-13 - the same record in our digital
delivery system. It gives a full bibliographic citation with item number
and series details from the finding aid and enables navigation up and
down the hierarchy through breadcrumbs.)

Judith

Judith Pearce
Director, Feasibility & Standards
National Library of Australia
CANBERRA ACT 2600
phone: +61 2 62621425
email: jpearce_at_nla.gov.au