Quoting Sarah Breau <[email protected]>: > > So do you prefer that I leave the editor in the author field?
Ideally, all types of creators would get a creation role (author, editor, illustrator, translator), and then we wouldn't have this dilemma. There was discussion about adding that but unfortunately the original data rarely provides that information in an easily usable way. > It irks me a bit because the editor of a book rarely does any of > the actual authoring, so it seems wrong to list him or her as an > author. Collecting and editing stories is different from writing. If you aren't already a cataloger, you are certainly exhibiting the analytic thinking that will qualify you as one! > However, it may make sense to put the editor in the author field > for searching. My understanding is that if an editor is listed in > the contributors field, then a search on the editor's name will > return all the books that he or she is credited with editing, but > that would only work in the general search, not in an author > search. What do you think is better? I wish I had a good answer for you. There are editors who have done so much work that I'm sure they would appreciate the recognition. Others, not so much. My gut feeling is that leaving them in the author position does no harm, and as you note it promotes them into the author class in OL that merits an author page. I see two "to-do's" for OL that come out of this: 1. Make it possible to record at least a limited set of roles (perhaps first by adding an editor field to the edition?) 2. Eventually treat all contributors in the same way that author is treated today. I can already see some further analysis that is needed to make these make sense in the OL context. If we don't already have them on our task/bug list, I will add them with as much explanation as I can muster. kc > > I could go back and place each of the authors into the author field > individually, but that is a lot of work and I find the authors in OL > hard to work with from the author field. Still, maybe that is the > right way to handle it. Except it wouldn't work for more academic > works (like conference publications) where one doesn't always have > access to all the contributing authors... > > Sarah > >> Actually, these probably come from Amazon records, not library records >> (the few I looked at were from Amazon). Libraries allow a book (or >> other item) to not have an author, either because it is unknown, or >> because the item was created in such a complex process that authorship >> isn't appropriate. (I believe that films fit this category). We talked >> at one point in OL of whether all of the books without authors would >> get a default author "anonymous", but decided that it might be ok for >> display but isn't at all useful for searching. It's kind of like >> having an input list and allowing people to use "other." >> >> kc > -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
