On 2/6/07, Hahn, Harvey <hhahn_at_ahml.info> wrote:
> When I was in library school, catalogers-in-training were instructed to
> typically assign no more than 3 subject headings to a work. I have seen
> this particular practical "rule of 3" mentioned over and over throughout
> the years up to the present, so I'm not so sure that the number of
> headings per record has increased as dramatically as you suggest.
I think you'll find that over time as records gets merged and the info
about the source of the original catalog is lost, there are far more
subject headings than that. I see it all the time, especially where we
merge large recordsets from various largish sources, with items
busting the 20 subject heading mark. This is however not bad in
itself, if it wasn't for the fact that source control is mostly lost
on MARC/implementors, at least in any meaningful way.
In fact, if I could fix one thing with MARC and our various
implementations of it, it would be to fix the lack of versioning and
source control.
Alex
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Received on Tue Feb 06 2007 - 00:39:32 EST