Alex Johannesen wrote:
|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.
The "rule of 3" was my theoretical side speaking (you have to know the
principles behind the rules before you can bend them--"spirit" over
"letter"); my practical side has often assigned more headings than that
in the various libraries I've worked for. Nearly half of my
professional life was spent in a smaller library, where I "broke the
rules" all the time in order to provide more and better access to a
limited collection by creating subject headings that weren't limited in
number by the rules and guidelines. (I felt that a small collection
needed as much analytical access ("bang for the buck") as possible--of
course, without going overboard.) I know there are other catalogers who
do/did the same thing, but it was certainly *not* with the sanction or
blessing of fellow catalogers who "towed the line".
|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.
For my own clarification, am I understanding you correctly that, by
"source control", you're referring to how and where particular portions
of data originate and tracking how that data changes, merges, and
separates over time? (A bit similar to "provenance" in the art world,
Ted Nelson's "hypertext" in his Xanadu project, or versioning systems in
both the open source movement and commercial software projects?)
Harvey
--
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Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
Desk: 847/506-2644 -- FAX: 847/506-2650 -- E mailto:hhahn_at_ahml.info
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Tue Feb 06 2007 - 10:39:01 EST