Rebecca:

Our NACO trainer said that adding the dates when establishing a heading was done to help break a possible future conflict. So, I still think the main purpose of dates in personal name headings is for disambiguation, whether current or future. What other purpose could the dates serve? Providing biographical information? That's not the purpose of the authority records, though.

Now with authority files being merged into services such as VIAF, birth and death date metadata has become more valuable because of its disambiguation value.


Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian / Assistant Professor
Auraria Library
University of Colorado Denver
1100 Lawrence St.
Denver, Colo.  80204 USA
(303) 556-5936
[log in to unmask]



-----Original Message-----
From: Metadata Object Description Schema List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Guenther, Rebecca
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 8:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MODS] MADS/RDF for review

It is not correct that dates are only added to distinguish between similar names. It has long been LC policy that birth dates are added if readily available when establishing a name (and death dates when available), NOT just to break a conflict. Which means that a large number of name headings have birth dates. Institutions participating in the cooperative programs (NACO/PCC) are required to do this.

We added field 046 in the MARC authority format last year as part of the changes for RDA. It is a general field for structured dates which has been available in the bibliographic format for some time (and new types of dates were also added there years ago). It is already being used in records coming through as part of the RDA test-- in fact I'm told that there are thousands of records with 046 fields containing birth/death dates for people. And of course it doesn't have to be limited to records prepared according to RDA but is there to be used for any records.

Rebecca

-----Original Message-----
From: Metadata Object Description Schema List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 12:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MODS] MADS/RDF for review

Quoting "Beall, Jeffrey" <[log in to unmask]>:

>> Library authority records are very odd beasts, and that oddity comes
>> out in FRAD [1]. The record is NOT about the person, per se. It does
>> not include information like birth and death dates, where the person
>> lives or lived, what they were famous for...
>
> To be precise, many library authority records do contain birth and
> death date information.

I don't know if you are referring to the year information added to name (Smith, John, 1876-), or to other information in the record. The years may be present in the name heading, but only when needed to distinguish between similar names. This turns out to be confusing to non-librarians, who wonder why we have the years on some but not all names.

More information will appear in notes for human readers sometimes, but the authority record does not have a field for birth/death dates.
Dates in the notes are not coded as such, so are not equivalent to actual date information. For example, here is a note from Barbara Cartland's authority record, in which her death notice is included to back up the addition of "-2000" to her name:

670     __ |a Washington post, 22 May 2000: |b obit. (Dame Barbara
Cartland, 98, died May 21, 2000; in London; author of 723 books published in 36 languages; born Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland in Birmingham, England; married Alexander McCorquodale 1927, divorced 1933; in 1936 married Alexander’s cousin, Hugh McCorquodale; 1991 Dame Commander of the British Empire; author of non-fiction as well as romance novels; step-grandmother of Princess Diana of Wales)

or in this case, where the note shows that the birth year was taken from "p. 4 of cover" (not sure what that means...) and gives the place of birth:

670     __ |a Cecil Rice, Venice, sunlight and water, 2006: |b p. 4 of
cover (Zoe Cooper; b. 1963 in Leamington Spa, England)

While the notes MAY have some birth/death information, it's not a machine-usable form of that data. There is a lot of really good information in notes, but it's just not coded in a way to be usable for any kind of computation, which is a real shame.

kc

>
>
> Jeffrey Beall
> Metadata Librarian / Assistant Professor Auraria Library University of
> Colorado Denver 1100 Lawrence St.
> Denver, Colorado 80204
> (303) 556-5936
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>

--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet