Jon,
There was some discussion of that approach on the PCC list last year.
The problem is that dates are much more likely to be unique than
subjects. Especially since subjects are somewhat general. If there's a
"Smith, John, writer on astronomy" set up, it won't be long before
there's another person who'd have to be described the same way. Of
course even dates aren't always completely unique. Occasionally you have
to add the exact date. For example, there are three John Smith, 1924-'s,
so two of them have the month and date added at the end.
Your proposal is really already in effect in "undifferentiated" name
headings. If you can't get any more information about several people
named John Smith, you put them all on one authority with descriptions of
the different things they wrote. The undifferentiated heading for Smith,
John is a really good example of that. When more information is found
about one of them, that "bibliographic identity" is removed from the
undifferentiated authority.
--Ted Gemberling
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jon Gorman
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 3:48 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Next Gen Catalog and FRBR
On 5/14/07, MULLEN Allen <Allen.MULLEN_at_ci.eugene.or.us> wrote:
> I am of a mind, however, that authority control as presently
configured is
> designed by and largely for librarians than other users. Birth dates
> and initials as a primary means of differentiating names in a browse
> listing is pretty sad customer service. [OK, do I want the Mullen,
> Allen born in 1957 or the one with middle initial Z. born in 1923 or
> perhaps the one with a middle initial P. and born in 1988? - yikes!]
>
One thing that I've mentioned other places that I've always been
struck that libraries don't help sort out authors by the one key piece
of information they already have....what did they write? It's
entirely possible that someone may be looking for works by an author
and not think to look up a particular title. But what if they were to
see a list of some of the titles associated with an author as
browsing? I would hope it could help them quite a bit in figuring out
that "Smith, John" that wrote "Dynamics of ferrate compounds" might
not be what they're looking for, but the "Smith, John" who wrote "25
ghastly ways to die" and "Murder in the Rogue's Morgue" might be that
mystery author they've heard about. Subject headings used in their
work also might help.
I haven't had enough time to implement something like this, but I'd
really like to try an author search that doesn't throw you immediately
into a pile of titles. Instead, it'll give you the chance to narrow
down the author or likely authors, then return the books. Worldcat
Identities look like a similar approach.
Jon Gorman
Received on Tue May 15 2007 - 13:58:47 EDT