Brenndorfer, Thomas <snip> The entries are organized by his role in each film: actor, director, producer, soundtrack, composer, miscellaneous crew, camera and electrical equipment. This is a very user-friendly organization.
The whole point to RDA is to allow properly differentiated and interconnected elements to thrive in these kinds of displays. Burying data in text descriptions is just that-- burying. It's wasted effort, and the data is of limited utility, happily living in flat file card-like environments, but not much use elsewhere. It's true that making full use of RDA elements in MARC is a problem, but it would be wise to assert that it is MARC that has the problem, not RDA. </snip> It may not be so much a MARC problem, but a conscious decision among catalogers quite some time back that continuing this sort of access was unwarranted. Adding relator codes have always been possible http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relaterm.html but, while I cannot point to a decision from where I am currently, it was obviously decided that it was not worth the effort. At this point, I can point to some cards http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_gU8TOkockqs/TKO77DZVvSI/AAAAAAAAAi4/_WHr-zMo_ac/s1600/loc-card-catalog-entries-sep-2010.jpg, that show earlier practices of "joint author", and "comp." The original LC AACR2 Rule Interpretation on relators apparently was issued in 1982, p. 29-30, when they decided not to apply the option, except for "ill." for illustrators of added entries. http://www.loc.gov/cds/PDFdownloads/csb/CSB_018.pdf. In addition, certain communities went their own ways, e.g. the art cataloging community for access for artists such as Albrecht Durer, who fulfilled many roles. There is a lot of metadata that could be added to records that is considered not worth the effort. It's important to distinguish between a complete lack of access (i.e. when a name is not recorded at all) as opposed to more "specific" access, such as being able to limit a search to someone as an editor, a publisher, a producer, a "joint author", and so on, although the person's heading can still be found. Of course, any information at all can be added, but the unavoidable question is: is it worth the effort to distinguish "blurb writer" from "licensor"? A practice that can be achieved only by 1% or 5% of the cataloging community cannot be considered practicable for the entire cataloging community. Perhaps in highly specific databases, it is worth the effort but for a general cataloger, practical matters must enter into it somewhere. And *especially so* today since the cataloging community is facing highly restricted budgets for a long time to come. James L. Weinheimer [email protected] Director of Library and Information Services The American University of Rome Rome, Italy First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
