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On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 09:01, Stephen Hearn wrote:
>  If we don't care about browsable lists
> anymore, then we don't need carefully structured heading strings.

I'd say that we don't need to carry those "browse" headings as fields in
our records, but we should be able to generate them (easily, I'd say)
from marked-up forms. So
  <name>
    <forenames>John James</forenames>
    <familyName>Smith</familyName>
  </name>

Easily becomes:
  Smith, John James
in a browse list.

BTW, ONIX has a variety of name forms defined that seem to meet some of
these needs:

PersonName - the name in normal order: James J. Johnson III
PersonNameInverted - the name in sort order: Johnson, James J., III

Then it has a 7 part name sequence:

TitlesBeforeNames - i.e. Sir
NamesBeforeKey - before the key name, i.e. any forenames: James J. (note
that this assumes that the group of forenames will always be treated as
a single unit -- there is no attempt to break this down further)
PrefixToKey - i.e. van
KeyNames - those names usually used to sort by: Garcia Marquez, or
Madonna (This is a nifty solution for the one-word names)
SuffixToKey - i.e. Jr., III
LettersAfterNames - i.e. Ph.D.

If you have the coded 7-part name, you do not need either for the first
two (person name and person name inverted) because you can generate
them. Then again, if you receive names as whole strings and don't have
the means to accurately parse them, you can use the fields that carry
full names. They are less flexible, but they should always result in a
user-friendly display.

>  I can
> imaging a file of MADS records which would generate responses to a search
> of discrete elements associated with an author. Multiple MADS records might
> have identical "headings" or display forms, but contain enough additional
> information in the MADS record to distinguish each author. By linking bib
> record name elements to the correct MADS records, one could have retrieval
> by individual authors without having individuated author headings.

It sounds like you are suggesting that we use info in the record to
distinguish authors, rather than forcing the headings to be unique. This
could facilitate dialogues like:

"Do you want James Joyce, who wrote Ulysses, or are you looking for
Joyce James, the cookbook author?"

The trick here would be finding a very brief display of the data from
the record that could work when the user has typed in "Joyce" and
retrieves a number (in many library catalogs, that means thousands) of
entries.

kc


--
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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