My memory was faulty - the roles are there: http://openlibrary.org/type/author_role
But it looks like they are only there at the Work level, not the edition. It seems to me that they are needed at the edition level, since at the Work level one mainly has authors, while translators, illustrators, etc. belong at the edition level. This needs some thought. kc Quoting Sarah Breau <[email protected]>: > > So do you prefer that I leave the editor in the author field? 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. 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 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]
