Laura Akerman said:
>What I don't think is valuable, is having to pick one author of a
>work with multiple authors and designate that person as the "main"
>one ...
As I asked Jim, how would you construct at 600$a$t subject or 700$a$t
added entry for a manifestation, if there were no main entry? How
would a scholar construct a footnote citation? How would you list it
in a single entry bibliography?
It seems to me main entry (by any other term) is a vital concept in
the bibliographic universe.
>For fields like subject, I believe there was a convention that the
>most important subject (the one upon which the primary classification
Ynumber was based) had the first position in the record. Since many
modern systems permit or even force re-ordering tags in numerical
>order, that positional value can and often is easily lost. Many of
>us stopped lamenting this a long time ago, but was it valuable?
Agreed. We do try to make the first 650 (as opposed to the first 6XX)
agree with the class number. But I suspect 6XX order is as
unimportant as note order to patrons.
There was a way of coding in UTLAS to bring a particular 6XX first,
one of many features lost with its demise. There was no wayy of
coding to bring a particular 5XX first.
For note order, we use more exact coding than most, e.g., 501 DVD
special features, 503 (which we refuse to give up) for "Originally
issued ...", 508 for all non cast credits, 511 for cast credets, "DVD"
in 300 rather than 538, 588 for source (e.g., IMDb). It's much less
labour intensive than arranging a bunch of 5XXs. (DVDs tend to have
more notes than many library resources.)
As mentioned in my list of requirements for a replacement coding
scheme, it should arrange data in optimum display order, without a lot
of manipulation at data entry, or complicated OPAC programming.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
