On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 13:52, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> To leave it to authority records to solve the problem is not an
> adequate solution, particularly if you're trying maintain compatibility
> across MODS and MADS.
In fact, in libraries it is the authority records that solve this
problem. So this may be a matter of differences in rules. The rule in
libraries is that each author gets one and only one "name." The name is
essentially a unique identifier for the author; as each new name is
entered into the catalog, the authority file is used to determine if the
name is unique (within that catalog, but since we all share now it needs
to be unique within the whole community that share bib data). If there
already is another instance of that name for a different author, then
work is done to make the new name unique (adding date of birth, or some
other info to it). This is why some names in library catalogs seem so
... unintuitive.
The authority record keeps all of the other forms of the name, and those
names are included in the library catalog as references to the unique
form of the name (called "authoritative").
You are preferring to allow equivalent forms of the name in a
bibliographic record. I don't know if your case is only for
transliterated vs. vernacular fields. If so, this is similar to what
MARC does with its non-roman script fields, which are a special case.
Those fields were not carried over to MODS, however.
I don't know enough about the languages in question, but could the
transliteration be an attribute on the namePart? i.e.:
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given" trans="Ichiro"> $B0lO) (B</namePart>
<namePart type="family" trans="Suzuki"> $BNkLZ (B</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
That would make it clear that they are the same name. And I would think
that the vernacular would be the authoritative form of the name, since
transliterations often lose some information.
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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