> William Shakespeare on The Art of Love: The Illustrated Edition of the
> Most Beautiful Love Passages in Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry
> (Hardcover)
> by William Shakespeare (Author), Michael Best (Editor)
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I'll put on my management hat:
So, now the catalogers are supposed to do *more* work by separately coding each name according to that incredible list of codes? Why isn't transcribing the statement of responsibility enough? Do we really believe that people need to search, e.g. Michael Best as an author separately from an editor, separately as a censor, separately as a Writer of accompanying material, separately as a storyteller ....? See: http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relaterm.html
If the purpose is not so that people can search all these bibliographic identities separately, why do it? What is the justification for a manager to commit resources to it, and making all previous records semi-obsolete, not to mention the incredible complexity of determining the correct relator code for terms not found on the list, the endless debates, and we can't forget the multiplier effect for each foreign language, when the statement of responsibility is still there?
If it's just a matter of aesthetics, there may be more important areas to place our ever-shrinking resources. If we think people want to search by multiplicities of responsibilities, it needs to be shown that it's worth the effort. Anything that cuts into productivity (our number one problem) must be considered very skeptically, especially in this age of decreasing resources.
Jim Weinheimer
Again, what seems simple can turn out to be incredibly complex and time-consuming.
Jim Weinheimer
>
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu>
> wrote:
> >> On Monday, March 16, 2009 8:32 AM, Ross Singer wrote:
> >> >What is this an argument for?
> >>
> >> That translating headings into "Author" rather than
> retaining a
> >> statement of responsibility is not always a simple solution. It's an
> argument
> >> against the practice seen in several systems of displaying a
> programmatically
> >> uninverted heading with a label "Author" or appended to the
> end of
> >> the title with "by", making up a statement of responsibility
> rather
> >> than using the one transcribed from the item (leading to the
> appearance that
> >> the book is "by" someone rather than "edited by" or
> >> "compiled by" or "retold by", or
> "defendant,").
> >> Another instance where this might look odd would be where the item is
> in a
> >> non-English language but the computer rearranges/creates its own
> statement of
> >> responsibility using English "by" rather than the
> transcribed foreign
> >> words indicating the function of those who are associated with the
> work.
> >
> > Yes. What I was trying to point out is that no matter how we display our
> information, there will still be people who have problems with it. We simply
> can't make everybody happy, and one of the reasons why I always thought the
> ISBD statement of responsibility is such a brilliant solution. It is about as
> accurate and as truthful as you can get.
> >
> > I was also saying that we expect average people to not understand their
> VCRs, automobiles, and so on, so why do we expect the average person understand
> everything in a catalog record? I think there are far more serious problems in
> understanding, and these are associated with difficulties with controlled
> vocabulary, earlier-later type records, contents notes, and associated issues
> such as bibliographic identity. But I have met no one who has found the
> punctuation so strange that it interfered with their understanding of the basic
> ISBD display. It's like my relating to some strange function on my TV set or
> microwave that I don't understand. I can still make it work but I don't
> understand why. Or care.
> >
> > We can get rid of the punctuation, but it will still be faced with the
> task of replacing it with something "better" that everyone will
> understand and that is just as accurate.
> >
> > Jim Weinheimer
> >
Received on Mon Mar 16 2009 - 11:02:03 EDT