Quoting Lee Passey <[email protected]>:

>> As per my previous note, this is Group 2.
>
> Yeah, I knew this. I don't know why I got confused momentarily; perhaps it's
> because it makes so much more sense to me to start with the authors before
> moving to the work product.

Yes, and they should have given them meaningful names!


> But even if you limit the definition of the word "agent" to be  
> synonymous with
> "actor" (e.g. one who acts), it really can't encompass those entities who are
> "NotAPerson." The 911 Commission did not write the "911 Commission Report";
> one or more individual members of the Commission, or their staff, were the
> true creators. The commission as a whole is /responsible/ for the document,
> but it did not act to /create/ it.


You can take that view, but the library cataloging view is that the  
corporate entity is the creator. So libraries would have no problem  
using Agent for corporate bodies. I realize that this is a stretch,  
but I've gotten used to it.



>> The FRBR/FRAD "name" is a display form for human use.
>
> I'm not convinced of that. The FRBR Final Report says that the  
> Entity name "is
> the word, character, or group of words and/or characters by which  
> the [Entity]
> is known....

<snip>

The reason why the name isn't useful as an identifier is that it can  
change. The name is a display form that, should the cataloging rules  
decide, could be replaced with another string. There are rules and  
reasons why this happens, but it is not a persistent identifier.

Note that I have not yet gotten a good analysis of the relationship of  
the name and the identifier in FRAD, and I am wondering about the  
persistence of either or both for names of people and corporate bodies.


>
>> I'm not sure why you find that OL ids are neither unique nor
>> immutable... perhaps you could explain?
>
> Perhaps it would have been more precise to say that OL ids are neither
> exclusive nor persistant.


<snip>

>
> Now, if we wanted to know the author of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
> (OL54321W) we would need to follow the redirection to OL12345W and would find
> a reference to OL11111A (Samuel Clemens). OL22222A apparently is now an
> orphaned record: while it refers to OL11111A as the master, no Work refers to
> it. Thus I conclude that it is non-persistent.


I admit I had trouble following all of this and hope that one of the  
OL programmers takes a look at it. My understanding is that the  
intention is that there not be any orphans, and creating orphans would  
be a bug.

Would it make a difference to you if, instead of re-direction, the  
previous identifiers were included in the record itself? That is a  
technique used by some databases, such as OCLC. I don't think we'll  
get to a point that we aren't constantly merging records from  
different sources, so this identifier issue is one that we need to  
resolve in a useful fashion.


Thanks,
kc



-- 
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

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