Interesting conversation going on. I totally agree that an author should be stated ; editors and compilers should be in another field. No author then catalog by the title. Just like in music people will look up a title or a band or singer. Only music educators would think to look for a composer, writer, or an accompanists.
Keep up the good work. Janelle Warden ________________________________ From: Alan Millar <[email protected]> To: Open Library -- general discussion <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, October 26, 2010 1:13:41 PM Subject: Re: [ol-discuss] Remove author? >> 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. I agree, but the "author" field is already an overloaded misnomer. The catalog has plenty of music CDs. (I've already cleaned up quite a few of the entries with "cdpham" and those other codes in them.) For classical music, calling the composer the author is a stretch but is close enough. For popular music, it is nearly always the performer, and not the composer, but "everybody knows" that people are going to search for popular music by the band or singer. And if the catalog doesn't already have movies in it, it probably will at some point also. Author is not literally a useful designation for movies. Most people aren't searching for movies by screenwriter. > 2. Eventually treat all contributors in the same way that author is > treated today. In my opinion that makes the most sense. IMHO, the current additional contributors list should be integrated with the author list, and the author list should have roles attached to each entry (with "author" as the obvious default). We certainly can call it the "author" list (as an historical artifact of cataloging convention and nod to tradition) but I think having one list of people with explicit roles will be the most useful way to organize and use the data. - Alan _______________________________________________ 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]
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