At 09:44 AM 11/22/2002 -0800, Joe Zeeman wrote:
>But how, then, is the transliteration to be linked to the element it is a
>transliteration of (assuming there is one in the record)? In my mind, the
>best approach would be to find a way to carry them in the same field.
I do think it's important to be able to link the transliteration with the
vernacular. In a sense they are two versions of the same information,
somewhat like a translation of the title. (BTW, there are titles which
appear in multiple languages, especially in documents from international
agencies like the UN and the EU. So that's another case in which we need to
treat two or more titles as being "parallel.") Note that there can be more
than one "non-parallel" title in a metadata record (i.e. if there are
multiple works in a single physical container), so allowing variations of
the title to "free float" isn't a good idea. Actually, if we are sincerely
about the flexibility of metadata in XML then we should never allow
variations of related data elements to free float. The big advantage that
XML has over the MARC format is that its more flexible structure can be
used to express relationships between data elements in ways that we cannot
in MARC.
So I think that the idea of a title block where multiple versions of the
same title can be kept together is the best one:
<titleBlock>
<title lang="ch">vernacular title</title>
<title translit="pinyin">here's the pinyin title</title>
<title lang="en">English title for same item</title>
</titleBlock>
That's it conceptually, at least. Someone else needs to do the right and
formal XML.
kc
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
http://www.kcoyle.net
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