Eric said:

>Hence, typical Festschriften consist mainly of either obsequious
>fluff or tired old papers that have been sitting around for decades
>because their authors couldn't get them past peer review.

I take it from the "humor" [sic] in your subject line, you are not
entirely serious.  I attempted to make a fresh contribution in the
paper a wrote for the Festschrift published upon a former student's
retirement.  (You know you are getting old when your former students
are retired.)

I think it is difficult to rationalize why some things are coded and
others not.  The letter codes for type of literature (008/33) taken
from CanMARC by MARC21 are not universally applied.  It seems more
important to me to know that an item is poetry than to know that it is
a Festschrift.   Having state university press publications coded as
government documents makes 008/28 useless for finding actual
documents.

One thing I've not seen discussed in regard to Bibframe, is what
replaces the functions of MARC fixed fields?  With the greater
accessibility of variable data than when MARC began in the 1960's, I
can accept that perhaps they are less needed now.  I don't recall
however all Festschrift records having a searchable note in the absence
of an 008 code.  Could some MARC fixed fields be make notes in a cross
walk To Bibframe?  

If data is lacking from description, e.g., jurisdiction if not there
to be transcribed and not provided, how are we to cope without
008/15-17 country of publication?  What about limiting searches by
language?  Will Bibframe have codes apart from type of publication?

In the case of Festschrift, would not a 655 genre heading be better
than a 246 title one?  Could more generous use of genre headings help
replace some of those (I assume) missing fixed field codes in
Bibframe?


   __       __   J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([log in to unmask])
  {__  |   /     Special Libraries Cataloguing   HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
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