On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 08:15, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>
> OK, and my point that series and collection could both thought of as
> belonging to a more abstract class of relatedItem?
I can see how series could be thought of structurally as a host. That
isn't how it is treated in the library cataloging rules, probably for
historical reasons. There are different kinds of series -- the numbered
series are much like periodicals, and even have an ISSN. There are
"publisher series" like "Penguin Classics" that are more of a marketing
brand, and often those aren't considered very important. Even if they
are added to a record, they are put in a field that isn't usually
searched. I guess the main difference between a series and a journal is
that the items in a series are often better known than the series
itself, whereas journals are usually better known than their articles.
In any case, in library cataloging series has its own set of fields. You
could even ask why journal titles aren't placed in the series field --
again, the choices are based on long-standing practice, not logic.
I still think archival collections are different, but we'd need an
archivist to weigh in. There are archival materials that are not part of
a specific collection, I believe. When they are, the collection is not
the same as a bibliographic "host" in that the archival materials where
not "issued" as a collection -- sometimes they were collected together
after the fact, and they may have very little in common
bibliographically (i.e. Thomas Jefferson's library, that he gave to the
Library of Congress, can be seen as an archival collection, even though
the books aren't related through their publishers). The archive can
assign items to the collection, and different archives could assign the
same item to different collections. So the collection concept is
somewhat artificial. The collection record that archives produce (called
a "finding aid") is structured very hierarchically, with the collection
being the "big box" and everything else inside it. I don't know what
they do with their single or more miscellaneous items. Although here's a
hint from a Yale library page:
" The Osborn 18th Century Bound Manuscripts are single items
acquired by the Beinecke Library from various sources at various times,
which the Library has chosen to describe here rather than in individual
records in Yale University Library's on-line public access catalog
(Orbis)."
The main problem I have with the archival point of view is that the
items in the collection are subordinated to the collection itself, and
there will be users who don't know what collections to look in. Keyword
searching is helping some now that finding aids are often available
online, but it used to be that you had to guess which collection might
be of interest to you.
kc
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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