Yeah, the main entry, as I understand it, was historically important for making references inside our _own_ bibliographic universe. In a card catalog world, when you cite another record, you need to cite it in a way that someone can look it up in the card catalog -- a single alphabetical list. So you need to know what name to look it up under. Additionally, by specifying a single controlled name, followed by a title (which, if we were theoretically pure would always be a controlled uniform title, but we weren't, because a transcribed 245 title is generally good enough and we didn't have the resources to make controlled title for everything) -- you uniquely specify another record prepared according to library cataloging rules. (Or you mostly kind of sort of do, which is good enough since it's mostly just humans following the 'links' manually, if you're close enough they'll still find it).
So the 'main entry' wasn't a ridiculous or pointless idea in the environment it was created in. It did serve a purpose of constructing a sort of 'identifier' within the library cataloging metadata world, in a card catalog (or even printed bound catalog) universe. It was in fact a pretty clever and efficient way to do that, within the constraints of a pre-computer environment. The term "citation" is used in cataloging materials in a very technical, formal, 'term of art' sort of way. When talking about a 'citation', those texts, using terminology written in a pre-computer era, are really taking about a "reference" or in fact what we now call an "identifier". It's not meant as a textual scholarly citation that you could put in a paper (and in fact the AACR2-MARC record, in the general case, does not include enough semantics to automatically machine generate such a scholarly citation reliably, as anyone who tries discovers.) "Citation" there is really used to mean a specific and unambiguous reference to another record within our own 'system' of records created according to our own consistent cataloging rules. It doesn't actually accomplish this very well, but well enough for the pre-computer world where it was 'followed' only by humans looking things up in an alphabetical file. (who could exersize human judgement and work around insufficiencies). In the computer world, there are a lot better ways to create such identifiers, the whole body of practice and experience actually called 'identifiers' rather than 'citations' in the computer world. There is no need for 'main entry' if you are using good identifier practice. On the other hand, if you are NOT using such modern identifier practice, then the 'main entry' system of 'citation' is probably better than nothing, even in the computer world. Or if you are not operating in the computer world at all, or want to create metadata which will works well in a card catalog or bound catalog world, maybe you'd want to preserve it. But it's got absolutely nothing to do with "a thesis writer constructing a footnote in a bibliography", the cataloging notion of 'main entry' is of basically no help to them whatsoever in that task. Scholarly citation formats are intentionally created so an author can create a citation from a title page alone -- ie from the transcribed elements already in our record in 245 and 260 which duplicate the information on the title page. No scholar needs a librarian to decide what is or is not the single 'main entry' in order to construct a citation., and it's of little to help to them in doing so. Scholarly citation formats often instruct scholars to credit the editor of a compilation, where we won't include an editor in a 'main entry'. Scholarly citation formats generally instruct people to credit multiple authors, whereas only one of the authors at most can be our 'main entry'. The rules for scholarly citations in footnotes and such have pretty much nothing to do with our rules for 'main entry' -- this is not an insufficiency in our rules for 'main entry', it's because our rules for 'main entry' in fact have nothing to do with scholarly citation formats -- the word 'citation' when used in cataloging texts to refer to a string composed of main entry followed by title (except when 'title main entry') is about providing clear and unambiguous 'links', 'references', or 'identifiers' to other bibliographic records, in a pre-computer world. ________________________________________ From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Weinheimer Jim [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 04, 2011 9:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Linked data J. McRee Elrod wrote: <snip> Jim said: >I agree that doing this (in my idea, this means having more than a >single "main entry" or in other words, multiple 1xx fields) ... How is a thesis writer, for example, construct a footnote or bibliography? We are not islands unto ourselves. We are part of a larger bibliographic universe. </snip> I work quite a bit with students and citation formats. I haven't seen citation rules yet that tells someone to determine a main entry. Their version of the "rule of three" has been--that I have seen--is a rule of seven or so. Some even go beyond that. Very often they do mandate that editors, compilers, translators, etc. be cited as such. The U of Wisconsin has some of the best guides I have seen. Here is their APA guide: http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/DocAPAReferences_Book.html Sample journal article: Yawn, B. P., Algatt-Bergstrom, P. J., Yawn, R. A., Wollan, P., Greco, M., Gleason, M., et al. (2000). An in-school CD-ROM asthma education program. Journal of School Health, 70, 153-159. Sample book: Castellanos, J., Gloria, A. M., & Kamimura, M. (Eds.). (2006). The Latina/o pathway to the Ph.D.: Abriendo caminos. Sterling, VA: Stylus. And when there are only two names, you use the ampersand: Hyde, J. S.,& Delamater, J. (2008). Human Sexuality (10th ed.) New York: McGraw-Hill. Retaining a *single* main entry no longer serves a purpose, although it was absolutely vital in a printed world. I suspect even back in the old days though, they would have said it was not a good thing to favor Gilbert over Sullivan for works to collate together, but it was a necessary evil in the card/printed catalog. It is still vital to maintain the distinction among primary creativity, secondary creativity, and responsibility for making a resource available. This is why I was always against the Dublin Core agents proposal http://www.archimuse.com/dc.agent.proposal.html Perhaps there are more areas of responsibility that the public will need, such as (the agents proposal points this out somewhere) an automaton, e.g. the software program used for scanning or OCRing a book. James Weinheimer [email protected] Director of Library and Information Services The American University of Rome via Pietro Roselli, 4 00153 Rome, Italy voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258 fax-011 39 06 58330992 First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/ Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
