Mac said:
My reaction is, why is this phrase included, when function is covered
by 264 2nd indicators?
My understanding is that transcribing things like "Distributed by ..."
is all about the so-called principle of representation: "The data
describing a resource should reflect the resource's representation of
itself." (0.4.3.4).
If you think about it, it's not really that much different from giving a
statement of responsibility like "by XY" in addition to recording a
creator relationship to XY and adding an appropriate relationship
designator. You could argue that if the name of the element and the
relationship designator are displayed, then all the necessary
information is already there. Giving the statement of responsibility as
well might be considered redundant information. But we still give it,
because it is valuable in itself to show exactly *how* the information
about the author is presented on the resource.
I think this also applies to these statements of function, although this
information is probably of less importance to our users.
On the other hand, the proposal mentioned by Francis
http://www.rda-jsc.org/docs/6JSC-LC-24.pdf
even proposes transcribing things like "published by", arguing:
"Differences between publication statements help users identify
different manifestations of a work. This is especially important for
manifestations without ISBNs, which did not appear on manifestations
until the later part of the 20th century. One manifestation of a work
might say "Published by Isaac Riley" and
another might say "Isaac Riley, Publisher."" (I'm not sure how often
this case occurs, though).
Admittedly, I sometimes wonder whether RDA doesn't take the principle of
representation a bit too far. For example, in shortening names of
publishers, the older codes of rules like AACR2 and RAK definitely
violated the principle of representation. But I can also see an
advantage in this and similar practices: You could say that catalogers
did some "preprocessing" with the raw data found on the source by
clearly bringing out the things which are really important for the
users, separating them from the "noise" around them. Now, in times of
RDA, our users have to find their way for themselves - through things
like legal information about publishers ("Ltd.") or their advertising
slogans ("Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften", i.e.
"international publisher of sciences"). If one of the main aims of
description is to represent the resource as it represents itself, then
perhaps a scan of the title pages would work just as well. (Sorry for
being a bit provocative here).
Heidrun
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Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
