Well, as John Myers said previously, and I agree:
"I am afraid that these standing granularity issues between the various
descriptive standards (AACR2, ISBD, RDA, DACS, etc.) and between each
descriptive standard and the communication standard (MARC or MARC21) are
going to play havoc with the visions of easy machine processing"
If you want to be able to output to a record format with a _higher_
(more specific) granularity than RDA itself has.... this is a barrier to
doing this without manual intervention. It's a barrier to the idea of
"catalog once for RDA and output in whatever record format you want".
Can't really do that if the record format you want to output in has a
more specific granularity than RDA itself.
I'm aware that this idea/vision in the first place has not been bought
into by some on this list.
Jonathan
John Attig wrote:
At 01:05 PM 1/28/2010, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
If $n and $p are important distinctions, shouldn't they in fact _be_
referenced by RDA? And, really, shouldn't they have been referenced
by AACR2 all along too?
They *are* referenced in RDA (and AACR2), which provides instructions
for recording them. But they are not formally defined separate elements.
In order to make them separate elements, we would have had to define
them as sub-elements of Title proper, which is an element sub-type of
the element Title. We were discouraged from descending to that level
of complexity.
If the distinction between $n and $p is important, shouldn't it be
mentioned as two distinct data elements in that guidance? If the
guidance should be independent from the record format you end up
storing the record in.... the distinction between $n and $p isn't
really something that should be specific to MARC, should it?
Again, they are mentioned in the guidance, but not as elements -- for
the reasons given above. The guidance is not *independent* of the
record format in which the data is encoded -- choice of an encoding
format is a necessary precondition to recording the data -- but the
guidance tries not to assume what encoding format you will
choose. It seems to me that the MARC decision to support subfields
$n and $p as data elements was appropriate in terms of the
instructions in AACR2, and continues to be valid for RDA.
John Attig
Penn State Univ.
jx...@psu.edu
