On 8/14/14, 2:12 PM, Stuart Yeates wrote:
> I'd like to echo this.
>
> If we have a pointer fully-populated authority control record for
> publisher, adding location of publication is redundant at best and
> misleading at worst.
If only it were that easy :-(. There is no one-to-one between a
publisher and a place. There is also no one-to-one between a "publisher"
(depending on how you define that) and what you find on the title page.
There's been a lot of talk about having authority control for
publishers, and at some point it may be possible, but with mergers,
break-ups, buy-outs, etc., keeping up with that will be a costly mess.
We don't want to head into that morass until it's been given a very good
analysis.
As for the question that Lars poses:
>
>>
>> If we -- however -- talk about place names in publication statements,
>> URIs (or geographic coordinates) may or may not be useful. For a C17
>> publication with the (fictive) publication statement "published by
>> John Nicholson in the High Street at the sign of the lantern and
>> printed by Jeremiah McTavish in the Lower Mile" it is clear that the
>> two places mentioned are the locations where the publication
>> (preparation of manuscript etc.) and the printing took place. We can
>> replace those two with URIs or geographic coordinates.
>>
>> Publication statements by modern scientific publishers sometimes
>> mention a whole range of place names, as in "Heidelberg, Berlin, New
>> York, Tokyo, München: Very-Big-Scientific-Publisher, 2012". I'm still
>> not sure if this means that
>>
>> 1) the book was published in all those places (at the same time?), or
>> if it means that
>> 2) it was published by the Very-Big-Scientific-Publisher and that the
>> publisher has offices in all those places.
A better approach may be: for the purposes we can imagine today that
would take advantage of URIs (linking, searching, other?), does the
difference between your 1 & 2 matter? What is the expected value of
retrieving information based on place of publication? If not precise,
what are the consequences? And does the answer to this question change
when we contemplate using URIs rather than when we develop cataloging
rules (which already instruct us to transcribe the places from the title
page, AFAIK)?
kc
>>
>> My gut feeling is that it really means 2) and that we really cannot
>> say that the book was published in http://dbpedia.org/data/Berlin,
>> http://dbpedia.org/data/Tokyo or any of the other places. Please feel
>> free to prove me wrong.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Lars
>>
>> *** Lesen. Hören. Wissen. Deutsche Nationalbibliothek ***
>>
--
Karen Coyle
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