On 8/15/14, 8:22 AM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> It seems clear to me that there are at least a few meanings being overlaid on this one piece of text:
>
> 1) A place at which the artifact in hand was created.
>
> 2) The location of the central business accommodations of the publishing entity.
>
> 3) A place or places at which the publishing entity wishes it to be known that they do business.

Yes, thanks. Good summary.

>
> probably others…

...if we look hard enough. ;-)


>
> It seems to me that 1) is a property of the publishing event, and 2) and 3) are time-varying properties of the publishing entity. Perhaps they have been elided in our metadata because they have frequently, in the past, been identical-- but is that the norm today?

I'm not sure that's the reason, although it does seem that place has
become much more fluid than it was before publishing became a more
global business. As I read the cataloging rules, one describes "the item
in hand" and rarely goes beyond that, as the effort would be
considerable. So in fact "place of publication" and "publisher" are
really "place on publication that is printed on the title page" and
"publisher, as printed on the title page." This is useful data, but
shouldn't be assumed to mean any more than that. In fact, the thing that
we call "publisher" is often not the name of the publishing *house* but
of an imprint. So I think that we have in a sense "misused" the terms
"place" and "publisher" as shorthand for "transcription of place and
publisher."

I know I've said this before, but we need to understand, deeply, the
actual semantics of our data before we decide to implement this same
data in RDF. And, as I have also said before, RDF is not a data
serialization. A key thing to keep in mind about RDF is that it has
specific semantics -- in a way that we haven't addressed in the past. Up
until now, we have lived with a fair amount of ambiguity, leaving it to
the catalog user to make sense of things.[1] Just see the discussion
about whether authority control is about persons or name forms. We can't
just take what we have in MARC and plop it into triples and declare
"mission accomplished." I'm convinced that we have to re-think a lot of
our current data practices. This is a good example of that, as your 3
conflated concepts demonstrates.

kc
[1] A short analysis of the many semantics of the 240 field:
http://futurelib.pbworks.com/w/page/35201781/Bib%20fields#AmbiguousCoding
>
> ---
> A. Soroka
> The University of Virginia Library
>
> On Aug 15, 2014, at 11:10 AM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> On 8/15/14, 6:06 AM, Donald R. Thornbury wrote:
>>> I completely agree. Place of publication is a relationship of the publisher entity.
>> It would be nice to investigate that "fact" -- with a few searches, here's what I find:
>>
>> 260 __ |a Oxford : |b Clarendon Press ; |a New York : |b Oxford University Press, |c 1990.
>> -> Clarendon press is in Oxford; Oxford University Press is in New York.
>>
>> 260 __ |a London ; |a New York : |b Oxford University Press, |c 1985.
>> -> Now OUP is in both London and New York
>>
>> 260 __ |a New York, |b H. Frowde, Oxford university press; |c [1902?]
>> -> Now it's only in New York.
>>
>> 260 3_ |3 2012- : |a London : |b Oxford University Press
>> -> Ooops, now it's in London!
>>
>> 260 __ |a Toronto : |b Oxford University Press, |c <1983- >
>> -> Hey, and it's also moved to Toronto
>>
>> I'm sure if I keep looking I'll find one that places OUP in Oxford, but I haven't encountered one yet.
>>
>> It seems that the "publisher entity" can "publish" in various places, which would make place an attribute of the publishing event, not of the publisher.
>>
>> My take: it's one thing to try to keep track of the "headquarters" of a publishing house, although those can also change. But that is not going to coincide at all times with the title page. We could consider them different pieces of information, but then I have to ask: What is the purpose of recording the place of publication? There is the transcription role; then there is the possibility of doing some statistical analysis on publication and publication rates based on times and places. Monitoring the development and movement of publishing houses seems to be a different goal than the bibliographic one that we generally take on in libraries.
>>
>> kc
>>> This bit of discussion is going over ground covered in FRBR 4.1:
>>> "For example, "place of publication/distribution" is defined as an attribute of the manifestation to reflect the statement appearing in the manifestation itself that indicates where it was published. Inasmuch as the model also defines place as an entity it would have been possible to define an additional relationship linking the entity place either directly to the manifestation or indirectly through the entities person and corporate body which in turn are linked through the production relationship to the manifestation. To produce a fully developed data model further definition of that kind would be appropriate."
>>> It's now time to develop the data model so it's not so string-y. Displays and user access to "authority" data can be configured to as to provide all relevant information.
>>> We should note that place of publication is not specified as a criterion for distinguishing monograph manifestations, per RDA LC-PCC PS for 2.1, and that in Table 6.3 FRBR has Place of publication/distribution as a low-value attribute for identifying manifestations. Transcribing place names as attributes a zillion times isn't worth the effort when we have a more efficient way to handle data.
>>>
>>> Don Thornbury
>>>
>>> Donald R. Thornbury
>>> Head, Technical Services for Special Collections
>>> Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
>>> Princeton University Library
>>> One Washington Road
>>> Princeton, NJ 08544-2098
>>> Office: 609.258.0874
>>> Fax: 609.258.2324
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum [
>>> mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>> Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 8:21 AM
>>> To:
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>> Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] Proposal to handle "Providers" differently
>>>
>>> Rather than reproducing the labels of a entity (e.g. place of publication) in several places for our own technical convenience, we can supply them on the entity (the authority data) and either by indexing ahead of time or by on-demand retrieval, we can use them for display at the appropriate time (during the patron's session).
>>>
>>> Patrons can certainly have access to authority "records". In fact, one could say that this is essential to doing good Linked Data.
>>>
>>> ---
>>> A. Soroka
>>> The University of Virginia Library
>>>
>>> On Aug 14, 2014, at 8:56 PM, "J. McRee Elrod"
>>> <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>> If we have a pointer fully-populated authority control record for
>>>>> publisher, adding location of publication is redundant at best and misleading at worst.
>>>>>
>>>> Patrons rarely have access to authority records. The brief display
>>>> should contain the place and jurisdictiion of publication, jurisdiction supplied if not in the resource.
>>>>
>>>> That is basic information, and often a clue to the viewpoint of a resource.
>>>>
>>>> We are working for patrons, not each other!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (
>>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>> )
>>>> {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing
>>>> HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
>>>>
>>>> ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
>>>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>>
>> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
>>
>> m: +1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
>>

--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
m: +1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600