Interesting essay from Thom Hickey on uniform titles, which echoes some
of the things some of us have been talking about about trying to use our
existing data for purposes it is not in fact suitable for, why some
changes are in fact needed.
http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2008/04/frbr-and-unifor.html
"AACR2 lists four uses for uniform titles, but the most common is to
group items that appear with multiple titles under a single heading.
Works such as /Don Quixote/ that are published in multiple languages and
under hundreds of different titles benefit from this. Unfortunately,
when trying to group manifestations into works, uniform titles do not
always correspond to what anyone would consider a work."
[...]
This isn't our first abandonment of the 240 field. WorldCat Identities
<http://worldcat.org/identities/>originally preferred the 240 to the 245
for the work display. Unfortunately relatively few people benefited from
seeing /Prestuplenie i nakazanie/ instead of /Crime and Punishment/, so
we switched to using the most common form of the 245 for display.
[...]
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu May 01 2008 - 12:44:39 EDT