I'm afraid that we continue to have some disagreements. See my comments below.
Karen Coyle wrote:
> Here are some things that need to change:
>
> 1) The "authorized heading" is also the identifier for the thing or
> person being identified. That means that if you change cataloging rules,
> you change the identifier. This is a very bad practice, because it
> breaks all of the links between bib records and authority records.
If I understand this correctly, you want an ISADN (International Standard Authority Data Number), which has been suggested by IFLA. I completely agree with this, not so much because the rules may change, but to help search related authorized forms between different national systems. I don't think that RDA will completely redo authorized forms as AACR2 did (at least, I hope not!). But the forms used by the French, Italians, Germans, Chinese and others will almost always be different. A correct system can bring these together and everyone could actually cooperate in creating records and searching by users would be made much simpler. This is some of what my paper was on: suggesting a computer system that can help all authorized forms interoperate with one another.
> 2) There is nothing to tell you, on a field by field basis, what
> language is represented by the heading. So you can't algorithmically
> select the languages that are important to your community for
> cross-referencing.
This one I have trouble with. I certainly do not think that people searching in an Italian language catalog need only Italian language cross-references. I would not want to take the responsibility to decide that users of an English-language catalog do not need, e.g. Chinese cross-references. I think they do.
> 3) The name authority record contains virtually nothing that could
> interest a user -- no bio about the author, nothing to help the user
> know who it is we are talking about. Giving an author's dates as a way
> to differentiate between authors may be fine when you have only two
> names and one has a 18th century date and the other has a 20th century
> date. But when you have authors who are contemporary (with each other) a
> few years difference in date of birth isn't useful because users are
> highly unlikely to know if an author was born in 1956 or 1958.
I do not know if a user needs to look at any single, complete authority record. I think that seeing the entire record for, e.g. Leo Tolstoy, would be too confusing for an untrained person. Users need to see the cross-references as they arise and any notes so that the catalog functions correctly. In this way, I think there is a lot of information in an authority record that interests a user, but they don't see any of it until they search a cross-reference. I see nothing wrong with this.
Actually, in many records, there is a certain amount of biographical information that we throw in when we have it, but the purpose of the authority record is not to provide biographical information, and as someone else mentioned, there is certainly no time to do this. A lot of the information is dated, of course. For example, my own record has me working at an institution a couple of jobs or so back.
But we should not forget that the cross-references are supposed to work more intimately with the bibliographic records than they do now. In the card catalog it was better in this way because the user immediately saw records that were related to the heading, and this allows the user to differentiate author. In the browse displays that I have seen, you have to click on each heading to see the related titles. (This is one of my problems with browse displays) So, you may have two people with the same name born a couple of years apart, but one is a poet, while the other is a classicist. Very rarely will you have two people with the same name born very close to one another, writing about the same topics. The bibliographic records distinguish similar authors very efficiently.
Possibilities for the future could be cooperation from the publishers, who h
ave biographical information, and the authors themselves by creating name heading wikis or something similar. WorldCat Identities is a major step in the right direction.
> OK, there are just 3 examples. and I havent' even touched on subject
> authorities. Nor have I touched on the issues of non-unique entries in
> the name authority 4xx's (which cannot be resolved algorithmically with
> the data we have today). Or lots of other things.
Non-unique records are a problem for everybody, but there is simply no information to break the conflict, so the catalogers do their best--sometimes involving a lot of work--but there is still no choice but to make a non-unique. You can only hope that someone in the future will have better information than you do. (It has happened to me that I have gone through all the work of setting up a non-unique name, and then the next book off of the shelf had the extra information I needed!)
> Believe me, anyone who has worked to make use of authority records in a
> system has a litany of issues.
I have problems with authority records too, but we should not expect too much from them. I think that before we start adding new tasks such as adding biographical information, we should first ensure that the records work the way they were supposed to work, and figure out new uses for the information that we have. Later we can start to think of new tasks with resulting new information.
Regards,
Jim
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Received on Wed Aug 22 2007 - 13:24:07 EDT