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What I don't think is valuable, is having to pick one author of a work with
multiple authors and designate that person as the "main" one, based on the
almost arbitrary factor of position of the name on the title page, (which is
often alphabetical), and ending up deeming this person "Creator" and
relegating the other author(s) to "Contributor" status. (Nor do I think
that dichotomy is particularly useful.)
As you may gather from the above, I disagree. The reason for my
disagreement is twofold: it needs to be plain that the record (or other set
of data if "record" is inappropriate) corresponds with the document in hand;
and it needs to correspond as well as possible with the citations users
bring to the catalogue -- the fact that citations may be imperfect does not
mean the data content doesn't matter. The implication is that joint
responsibility needs to be acknowledged (as, I believe, does editorial
compilation of existing material, like volumes of readings -- the citations
are written that way, why not cataloguing also?) otherwise we place a
barrier of ambiguity between user and data. And one of the functions of
catalogue records is to be used to create citations -- Endnote, anyone?
So long as different elements are distinguished (names, relationships,
titles, other significant data elements) the format in which it's recorded
is very secondary.
Hal Cain
Melbourne, Australia
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