Rob Sanderson wrote:
My first question would be: Why?
Why invent a new element for title (etc.) rather than using Dublin Core?
Wouldn't it have been easier to do this building from SWAP?
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile
And my second question would be: Really?
251 elements!! Man... At least they're not just numbers, but ... do you
expect anyone to actually use it?
Rob
There are very few elements in RDA that have a real DC equivalent
(although you'll find somewhere in the RDA documentation an RDA-to-DC
crosswalk). Title may be the only one that could use the DC term, but I
also have to confess that "title" as an element is not actually used in
RDA -- only specific types of title (title proper, parallel title,
etc.). The list we were working from had 'headers' like title, followed
by specific elements, and we haven't yet decided if these headers become
classes. So the element title is an anomaly, and there are a small
number of others in the list that will require more study. That said, if
the RDA 'title' has sub-elements for types of title, then I don't think
we can use dcterms:title as it is defined.See the note under
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-title.
251 elements -- well, have you looked at RDA? That's why we want to
develop application profiles -- so that people can select only the
elements they actually need. RDA attempts to cover all possible
cataloging situations (as did AACR) so it's full of instructions that
will be used only by very specialized libraries. (Note that MARC has 175
fields and 1711 subfields -- and many of those subfields are what we
would call 'elements'. RDA does not cover everything that is in MARC, so
an actually data format that includes RDA will need many more than the
RDA 251.)
kc
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