Matthew Beacon said:
>I have no clear idea of what could be meant by the contrast between
>"re-using entity descriptions via referencing " and " our former
>text-based approach."
What this called to my mind was the UTLAS 1970's replacing of access
points (1XX, 6XX, 7XX, etc.) with what they called ASNs (authority
sequence numbers) in MARC records, with the name or term, e.g.,
"Shakespeare, William ..." or "Chemistry" stored as text only once
under than ASN, and displayed with the records linked to them when
viewed.
If this were extended to the whole citation, might it be what is
described in the quote?
One advantage was that one could key "shakespeare william 1564", and
get the ASN in the record upon verification, and the full coded entry
point upon display. A second advantage was that a change to that
authority resulted in the new form being displayed for every
bibliographic record linked to it. (Of course smaller libraries
without inhouse authorities lost those advantages once they downloaded
the record with text rather than the ASNs.)
This is what UTLAS meant by "authority control", as opposed to what
was done at the time at OCLC.
I fail to see how RDA without integration with MARC can address this
matter. How data is coded is central to machine "referencing" isn't
it?.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
