Quoting Kelley McGrath <[log in to unmask]>:
> On the other hand, there are some things that I think ought to be in
> MARC that aren't. I have devoted a lot of effort to trying to get
> some of these that are related moving image materials added. One
> that still isn't there is a consistent, machine-actionable place to
> unambiguously record the date of original release of a moving image
> in the bibliographic record. Original release date is generally
> given in citations for movies and TV programs so it's clear that
> it's important to users.
Note that the analogous information for books is also not recorded,
although I don't think it's a MARC question but a cataloging question:
the original date of publication. Re-issued versions of classics have
dates like "2008" and no where in the bib record does it say that the
Work dates from, say, 1813. This has got to be a bit confusing for
users, some of whom are undoubtedly wondering why someone writing
today sounds so... antique. Admittedly sometimes this date isn't
known, but where it is I would think it would help users make their
selection from the catalog; it would be good to know if you are
getting a modern work or one from 200 years ago. It would also allow
searching by a meaningful date, for example if you wanted to read
fiction from a particular time period. In many library catalogs today
if you search for Pride and Prejudice and date 1813 you get zero, even
though the library may have multiple versions of the Work.
kc
>
> Use can be unreliable for other reasons. For example, there is a
> chicken and egg problem with many data elements. Some of these are
> old elements which were prescient, but not used by systems. This led
> many catalogers to stop bothering with these fields despite their
> potential usefulness. As a former colleague put it, "I got tired of
> cataloging for my grandchildren." At my former library, we came up
> with a way to allow users to search for chamber music by
> instrumentation
> (http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/librarycatalogs/chambermusic.htm), but
> we had long ago stopped populating the 048 coded instrumentation
> fields that we needed to drive the searches. This left us with a lot
> of work to fill in the missing gaps in the data.
>
> A lot of newer fields and subfields don't seem to get a lot of use.
> It's partially because they are often niche elements, but it's also
> that they tend not to be supported by systems so they're not
> searchable in useful ways and they're often not publicized enough so
> that the broader community of catalogers know about them. This isn't
> necessarily a reflection of their potential value.
>
> Although application profiles may be a good solution for specialized
> data, there have to be the time and resources to set them up and
> maintain them. For smaller special interest groups, this may be
> difficult or impossible. As the OLAC liaison to CC:DA, I feel
> overwhelmed by the number of changes that we would like to see in
> the way moving images and other media materials are handled in RDA.
> OLAC is struggling with tackling this as well as creating best
> practice guidelines for RDA. It's hard for me to see that we have
> the resources for a major project on another front, such as an
> application profile for a new bibliographic framework.
>
> Kelley
>
> Kelley McGrath
> University of Oregon
> [log in to unmask]
>
--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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