Re: Tables of content

I think the key thing here is "parts that have their own bibliographic
integrity" -- which tells me that these parts deserve bibliographic
access on their own. That's something that the cataloging rules don't
address well, since cataloging (still) focuses on the distribution
package. The most glaring examples are short stories and musical pieces.
Oddly, these get different treatments in today's records: in the latter,
there is an added entry for the composer and the (uniform) title of the
piece. In theory, that heading does cause an analytic entry to be
created (well, it would if we were still creating cards). For the
former, added entries are rare. Yet the data in the ToC field is often
enough to create one.

That said, I think we have two different kinds of issues here. One is
the desire to show users the ToC of a single work. Another is to create
entries for "parts that have their own bibliographic integrity" and to
be able to navigate up from the part or down from the whole. I don't
think we want separate entries for individual chapters in a book that is
a single unit. I agree with Judith that we need to be able to express
whole/part (or package/resource) relationships in our databases, and we
need to be able to give individual works their due, regardless of packaging.

kc

Judith Pearce wrote:
> 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
>
>
>

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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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