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Owen, it's hard to disagree with this, and equally hard to figure out what this "thing" should be called. To figure that out, we'll have to know what the "thing" is, and I, for one, am not entirely clear on that.

Authority records contain preferred and alternate access points. ("See from" and "see also from") They also contain quite a few notes fields that are used by catalogers to document how decisions about the access points were made.

The examples in this document (the "lightweight abstraction layer") appear to include only the access points themselves, not the "see from" or "see also from" data. Yet:

" BIBFRAME Authority was also described as a functional component introduced to facilitate indexing and display challenges." (Section 1 of http://bibframe.org/documentation/bibframe-authority/).

Display of bibliographic records today uses only preferred access points, but indexing surely would be expected to make use of the alternate terms, and of course the alternate terms are designed for heading browse displays (although few systems make use of this method today).

It seems that more needs to be said about how this "lightweight abstraction layer" would be used and what it is intended to represent.

kc

On 5/13/13 8:39 AM, Owen Stephens wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite"> Thanks for this

I'll start with an easy comment :) 

As the paper states (section 2.7) " a BIBFRAME Authority is not conceptually identical to the notion of a traditional library authority, the name - Authority - may be confusing and distracting to traditional librarians and their developers"

While acknowledging there is a whole heap of terminology that we are going to have to get our heads round and use in relation to BIBFRAME, and that if one defined the BIBFRAME Authority entity well it would be quite clear this was not the same as an 'authority' in the sense of the LCNAF (Name Authority File), I agree - the use of the term 'Authority' here is likely to cause confusion, and it's already led me down the wrong path several times while trying to write an email about it :)

An alternative proposed in the paper is ' BIBFRAME Access Point' which seems a slightly better description of what is being aimed for here from my point of view, but others may disagree I guess.

Owen

Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
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On 10 May 2013, at 22:38, "McCallum, Sally" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Here is another part of the BIBFRAME pie to stimulate discussion and questions for the community to consider, On BIBFRAME Authority.  This issue paper concerns the Authorities concept in the BIBFRAME model paper.   This paper clarifies what the model document says about the Authority part of the model and invites discussion.
 
 
Again it is helpful if when discussing this paper, you name your listserv comment with the topic  plus  an extra title to bind threads, e.g., "authority--main point". 
 
Looking forward to your comments,  Sally
 
 
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Karen Coyle
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