Shouldn't qualified values for PLACES depend on international standards like ISO Country Codes <http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm> or others at national / regional level?
At any rate, the question goes beyond the technicalities and calls for reflections about the development of completely new features in catalogues RDA-based or designed with a RDA and linked data approach. As a default solution, I would say that 1) I cannot see any business justification for librarians, cataloguers, copy-cataloguing services etc to collect and treat any personal information like date of birth, death, country of residence etc for living people without the active and responsible engagement of end users, id est the same authors. For instance opening up to "wiki-fied" versions of catalogues can be a solution (I wrote about this with regard to industry and commercial classifications at http://bit.ly/brublog - Towards "wiki-fied" versions of classification schemes?). Pioneered versions of participated cataloguing processes can be observed in services provided for free / fee based like Librarything. Catalogues could and should be designed in order to facilitate links with other web sites, databases and social networks through linked data / semantic web standards and identifiers but even is the level of technical interoperability was good enough to proceed in this direction, we must be aware that human, cultural, legal interoperability is truly further down the line as far as personal data of living people are concerned. At least in Europe. For authority control purposes see the recent British Library press release at <http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/How-to-easily-identify-all-digital-content-contributors-The-answer-is-ISNI-497.aspx>. Speaking from a european perspective, again, we see that in some contexts the disclosure of personal data of authors may be appreciated or even be mandatory - I wrote about these options in my recent paper "Cataloguing the unfindable" (Preliminary self-archived version available at <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1738079>) where I considered challenges of data protection / privacy within records management and cataloguing practices in relation to policies and governance to prevent cybercrime. BUT this does not mean that cataloguers are authorised to pick up personal data out of contexts and without explicit licensing agreements just because there are new RDA elements and attributes to be filled... 2) in particular, data related to residences of living authors in catalogues should be avoided. The idea to put these data in catalogues without explicit and formal users' authorisation, to be provided, continuously updated and managed according to a specific policy within any single organisation sharing the data, is basically illegal in Europe but above all is completely unrealistic from an organisational point of view. As usual, these are provisional thoughts and opinions. Any further consideration welcomed. Brunella Longo
