On 1/18/2012 3:21 PM, John Hostage wrote:
Maybe the idea of hard-wiring dates and other additions into access points has
outlived its usefulness. It made sense in a card catalog, but maybe not so
much in an online world. Dates and other information can be carried as
separate elements in an authority record and combined as needed for display, as
in the German authority file, e.g. http://d-nb.info/gnd/119545373/about/html
Yes.
In a card catalog environment, a single string is used to serve as
_both_ the 'identifier' (used for collocation, and determining that all
records belong to the exact same 'heading' entity); AND as a
user-displayable display string.
This has a lot to do with the nature and form of our headings, that they
were created in such an environment.
In a computer environment, this is no longer the case.
Now, to be sure, figuring out most effective and efficient (for our
users, and for our back end workflows) way to do things in the new
environment is, well, something. If, for instance, you have two people
with the same name, you still don't want to show two identical headings,
they need to be disambiguated somehow in their display to the user.
Life dates may or may not be the optimal way to do that, in a
displayable string -- it's probably not best for our users, but what
might be best for our users might be too hard for us to do? Maybe "field
of activity" or "best known work", maybe different for different
people?. Life dates are _definitely_ not the best way to do that in the
actual _identifier_, because identifiers work best when they _never
change_, and life dates change (when someoen dies, or when we discover
we had their birth date wrong, etc), which causes real and serious
maintenance and linking problems.
------------------------------------------
John Hostage
Authorities and Database Integrity Librarian
Langdell Hall
Harvard Law School Library
Cambridge, MA 02138
host...@law.harvard.edu
+(1)(617) 495-3974 (voice)
+(1)(617) 496-4409 (fax)
http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/
-----Original Message-----
From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access
[mailto:RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA] On Behalf Of J. McRee Elrod
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 14:29
To: RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA
Subject: Re: [RDA-L] RDA question about dates
Thomas quoted:
"A person known to have been born 100 or more years before the
formulation or re-examination of a heading should be assumed no
longer to be living."
A person born 50 years before being entered, will in five decades have
been born 100 years earlier. I ve been cataloguing since 1953!
Something which changes over time* should not be standard practice.
Hyphens before and after is such a better solution, in terms of
consistency, ease of machine manipulation, and suitability in
multilingual situations.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
*Concepts of time vary. When I was 60 and my grandson was 6, his
mother explained to me that one year was 1/60th of my life, but 1/6th
of his. Of course a year seemed longer to him. At 80, a decade seems
but a moment.
