Bruce and James,

Actually, I think 'sensible' is a better descriptor than 'arcane'. I
have no illusions that I can explain it more clearly than has Barbara
Tillett in her posting, but perhaps this may help...

Think of it from a database design perspective. If you view books and
persons who have some responsibility for them ('authors', for brevity's
sake) as database objects, of which object (the book or the author) is
the name 'Mark Twain' more properly an attribute? The book _Tom Sawyer_
or the person who also has the name 'Samuel Clemens'? The 'arcane
cataloguing practice' of authority control is designed so that the
reader needn't know under what name Clemens wrote _Tom Sawyer_ (or any
other of his numerous works). If you regard the name as an attribute of
the work, then you would either have to append every known variant name
to each of his work objects or else you would have to settle for knowing
in advance which variant name went with which work object, would you not?

Happy Thanksgiving,

- mt

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>
> James, I've brought this up a number of times over the last year or two,
> and technicaly, no, there is no support for alternate names, and it's a
> touchy subject here because of what I'd call arcane cataloguing
> practices that have influenced MODS (and now MADS).
>
> Aside: I had an interesting conversation over lunch at the Access 2005
> about this with a few librarians and an archivist. I was explaining it
> made no sense to me that in the 21st century library cataloguing
> practices (and the XML formats that serve them) still focus on names.
> Names, put simply, do not do anything, and are simply labels for more
> fundmental objects. People author books.
>
> Anyway, the interesting part of the conversation was the archivist
> explaining that their catloguing practices are different, and that they
> indeeed tend to focus more on the objects (people, organizations, etc.).
>
> Bruce


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