Jim, 

I take your point about being aware of fiscal reality, but I also think
that saying "as good as you're going to get"  might blind us to 
opportunities to think differently about this. There are other approaches 
to giving access to Festshriften and like works (i.e. analytic records), 
yet the practice of putting that information in a 505 (with variations on a 
theme: 505 + 700at ; 970..) is so widespread that rarely are alternatives 
even discussed, and I sometimes wonder if those alternatives are even 
perceived. Most of the articles that talk about enriching catalog records 
focus almost exlusively on the 505 approach, as though others never even 
existed. Sure there is the occasional reference to analytics, but it's a 
passing reference at best. This is just the way it's always been done. But, 
in essense we already recording the necessary ingredients for creating 
analytic records, especially in the case of formatted contents notes with 
700at. Reconfigured you have skeletal analytic records. 

We often look to automation to help us reduce the labor of contructing 
records, so I wonder if we can look to automation in this situation. For 
example, Connexion and some ILS systems allow us to derive a name authority 
record from a base bib record. I am just dreaming here, but likewise might 
we also derive analytic records which would inherit some of the necessary 
data from the base bibliographic record?  Some information, like subjects 
or classification, might be left to the taggers or input later (isn't that 
the essense of Tennant's idea of "descriptive enrichment"), yet at least we 
would have records around which additional data could accrete.   

WorldCat.org, for example, is already demonstrating the benefits that arise 
from giving access to records for articles, analytics, books, and 
everything else all in the same interface. We have an opportunity, don't 
we, to unlock the potential of data that usually gets locked away in a 505. 
Might it be useful to treat TOC information in two different ways? Dump the 
TOC information that lack authors and titles into the keyword hopper. For 
those that have the base ingredients for analytic records, let's treat them 
differently. We would get two for one: the usual benefits of keyword access 
but also improved collocation. 

We might look to outside of the normal cataloging literature for 
inspiration, like David Mimno's "Finding a Catalog: Generating Analytical 
Catalog Records from Well-structured Digital Texts" 
(http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mimno/papers/JCDL2005/f74-mimno.pdf).
Again I am just dreaming, but as a start let's construe formatted 505's as 
a kind of well structured digital text and derive from that analytic 
records.

Could the ethical dimension here be knowing that we now have real 
opportunities to expand the edge of the bibliographic universe, thereby 
increasing access, and failing to do so?

Bryan Campbell
Library Assistant
VDOT Research Library
530 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903 
Ph: (434) 293-1903 FAX: (434) 293-4196 
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