On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 12:12 AM, Marc Truitt wrote:
> These functions are at the very heart of modern cataloguing rules and
> have been for well over a century. They are quite apart from MODS or
> MARC and should not be confused with them. MODS and MARC are merely
> reflecting in code these longstanding approaches to organizing
> bibliographic information.
Thanks for your list. But again, I'm not questioning the "functions";
I'm saying they can be better coded in MODS.
Let's look at this:
> 1 Smith, John, 1618-1652 Selections 1660
> 1 Smith, John, 1618-1652 Selections 1673
OK, here we seem to have two unique names for the same person. Why?
Shouldn't there only be one name listing for each person? (This is not
a trivial point, I might add, because if I am looking for all the
records from a given author, I cannot ever be sure I have found them
all, because they are commonly stretched across entries and they're
rarely clearly labeled in my catalog at least).
What if instead, this name was coded like this:
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">John</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Smith</namePart>
<date type="birth">1618</date>
<date type="death">1652</date>
<description>poet</description>
</name>
And the search result gave me:
Smith, John poet 1618-1652
That would allow me to unambiguously find which "John Smith" I was
looking for.
Or alternately, the search interface itself allowed me to identify all
the holdings of poets born between 1600 and 1625?
(And an even larger question: we have the DOI to uniquely and
unambiguously identify digital objects; why not names?)
Bruce
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