If one determined that place of publication was worth the investment in time and resources necessary to render it useful for machine manipulation (e.g., how many works of fiction were published in London, Ontario, in 2007?), wouldn't it be more efficient to have a Publisher entity with associated places and dates? One might then, for example, select from among the places associated with a given publisher those that pertained to a given manifestation. If the places were themselves entities drawn from an outside geographical schema, all the better, if only for purposes of reliable manipulation and aggregation.
I remain unconvinced, however, that all this would be worth anywhere near the effort that would be needed to make it work. What exactly is a place of publication? The location of the editorial offices, of the corporate headquarters, of a post office box, or in some cases a deliberate deception? Is it the place in the imprint position on the title page or the different place identified as such on the verso? It quickly gets fuzzy, introducing a corresponding fuzziness into any analysis based on it. I am more comfortable regarding place of publication only as a physical mark helping to identify a given resource as the one sought.

Ed

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 25, 2011, at 3:04 AM, "Karen Coyle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> What I haven't seen discussed here is the frequency with which this
> data is needed. When I post about making place of publication an
> actual place data element, I'm told there is rarely a need for it. How
> often is a precise comparison of title pages of essence? Is it worth
> making copies of all title pages for that number of instances? Does
> this apply to all works, or is there a niche where this has more use
> than, say, currently published trade books?
>
> What this comes down to is a need to look at all of our data practices
> and ask ourselves:
>
> - who needs this?
> - what is the context in which they need it?
> - how often is it used?
> - is there a more efficient way to provide this information?
> - is there a better way to achieve this goal?
>
> If I were being asked to create a new metadata scheme for Widgets,
> Inc., those are among the many questions I would ask of the providers
> and users of the information.
>
> One of the big difficulties that I see for this effort is that most of
> us come to the task with deeply ingrained practices and assumptions.
> We won't go very far forward if we can't re-visit all of these and
> decide what REALLY is needed today. This is why I recommend that there
> be some non-librarian IT folks consulted. As I said in a blog post, in
> fact that is exactly how MARC was developed - by an IT person who
> (fortunately!) was very good at listening to librarians.
>
> http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2011/08/bibliographic-framework-transition.html
>
> kc
>
>
> Quoting Ed Jones <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>> Actually, I was thinking more of page images, trying to look at the
>> two kinds of data. I was viewing transcribed data as serving the
>> function of "Is this what you were looking for?" in which case, as
>> Robert points out, transcription is inexact, and a page image would
>> be more faithful. In a world where keyword searching is the default
>> mode for most of us, I see structured access points, etc.--the other
>> kind of data--as means of slicing and dicing the result set and
>> triggering related-entity searches. The whole text would indeed be
>> present in any contemporary e-text file--and even as imperfect OCR
>> in digitized older resources--to facilitate keyword searching, but I
>> wasn't thinking of any accompanying metadata. I wanted to try to
>> look at the question purely in terms of the two kinds of
>> data--three, if one includes the jumble of extracted text--and ask
>> whether, if the purpose of the transcribed sort is really to answer
>> this question-- "Is this what you were looking for?"--whether a page
>> image or two serves the purpose better.
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Sep 14, 2011, at 4:38 PM, "Mark Ehlert" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> J. McRee Elrod <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>> Ed Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Would transcription still be necessary if a title page (or analogous
>>>>> source for other types of resource) image were routinely included ...
>>>>
>>>> We include "thumbnails" of cover images for a major client (30,000
>>>> records so far). But they are images, and can not be keyword
>>>> searched.
>>>
>>> Ed's not referring to keyword searching an image with text. He's
>>> referring to, say, an ePub or PDF file of text (title page or whole
>>> work) within the coding of which is metadata that can be searched on
>>> or extracted and put into a database. You might be familiar with EXIF
>>> and image metadata, which is somewhat similar.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark K. Ehlert Minitex
>>> Coordinator University of Minnesota
>>> Bibliographic & Technical 15 Andersen Library
>>> Services (BATS) Unit 222 21st Avenue South
>>> Phone: 612-624-0805 Minneapolis, MN 55455-0439
>>> <http://www.minitex.umn.edu/>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet