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On Monday, May 5, 2003, at 09:33 PM, Karen Coyle wrote: > At 07:00 PM 5/4/2003 -0400, you wrote: >> I'm not sure the authority attribute is where you would correctly put >> the cataloguing rules, but my basic point is that "musical group" in >> this context is a description. > > No, it's a special qualifier so that names that are otherwise > identical become unique. That's another thing that libraries do -- we > assign unique names to authors and other "creators." This is part of > the reason why the names in the library catalog sometimes look odd. > > Understand that there's a big difference between creating a single > citation and managing a catalog of works. The citation just has to > make sense within the context of a single article or a book. And there > has to be enough that you can go from the citation to the item, either > in a library or online. The purpose of the library catalog is > different -- it attempts to create a bibliographic universe out of all > of the items the library owns. I understand that the needs of an organization keeping track of millions of records is rather different than what I need to deal with, and that in this case having "Roustabouts (musical group)" allows you distinguish it from, I dunno, "Roustabouts (football team)." But isn't what you are telling me that this is one approach to solving to problem of unique names? With all the metadata power provided by XML, is there really no other way? I'm not saying ditch the additional information that allows you distinguish this as a unique entity; I'm saying "isn't there a better way to handle this in MODS?" Bruce