absolutely - and that is exactly what I've been working on - not the
final carrier as I hope RDA will move forwards with that, but on the
ability to make explicit the relationships that are implicit in the
catalogue records.
It's no accident that this prototype http://tinyurl.com/23xh7o is
called "Relationship Browser".
For those with a high level of authority control it is already
possible to pull a substantial amount of relationship data from
bibliographic records and make use of it at a very high level of
quality.
AFAICT Marc is not going to get us to where we need to be - at least
not close to its current form. That does not mean we have to throw
everything away and start again though!
rob styles
On 30 Nov 2007, at 16:52, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Martha, you and I have discussed this at length, so you know that I
> disagree that the problem lies with systems. It is true that
> bibliographic records are very rich and contain a lot of important
> data.
> However, as long as bib data continues to be expressed as text strings
> that require human interpretation, systems will NOT be able to make
> use
> of the underlying concepts. This is one of the great errors in the RDA
> drafts that we have seen: the bibliographic description continues
> to be
> textual in nature, with relationships left as implicit in that
> text. We
> need rules that can make explicit what today is implicit. And we
> need a
> bibliographic record carrier that can carry those explicit
> expressions.
Received on Fri Nov 30 2007 - 12:18:46 EST