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The question is also, are bibliographic descriptions in catalogs suitable for fingerprinting to create pointers to real world entities, or to something else, which I call the "bibliographic universe of things"? For example, if a bibliographic record contains "London (Ontario)", is it the real London (Ontario), or is it "a textual entry in a book from which a cataloger assumes the publishing place of the book is London (Ontario)?" Or both? Jörg On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 8:55 PM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Ralph, I think this is moving into the territory of "transcription vs. > LOD" that has been discussed here, or "document vs. data." Or even "things > vs. strings." I like the idea of viewing it as "fingerprints" - kind of > extended incipits, if you will. And your point that it isn't either/or is > very important. We can have both transcribed "fingerprints" and URIs for > things. > > Something else that I meant to mention in response to Lars' post, but > still can't quite put into words: do all of our pointers have to be 99.99% > guaranteed correct? That's the approach we take today (or pretend to), but > in a "big data" world, it is possible to get close to truth even when some > data are wrong. If a few "London (Ontario)"s get the URI for London, UK, > does that invalidate the entire world of bibliographic data? Can the whole > have a truthfulness that individual statements do not? Can we use data > analysis to resolve some of these problems? > > kc > > > > > On 8/15/14, 11:25 AM, LeVan,Ralph wrote: > > We collect metadata for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is to > allow the holder of a book to match that book to catalog records. “Is the > description here actually for the book I have?” The holder of the book > only has access to the “fingerprints” on the body for making an > identification. The publishing statement is one of those fingerprints. If > we make it go away and replace it with a pointer to an authority record, > we’ve lost the connection between the book in hand and the description of > that book. > > > > Might it make sense to separate those descriptive practices? Might we > have a “fingerprints” section in a manifestation description? If we > capture those few unique fingerprints that the book holder has access to > and separate them in our description from the authority descriptions, might > we not make both processes simpler? Let’s have a fingerprint with the > publishing statement from the book **and** a pointer to a publisher **and** > (if possible) a pointer to a publication place. > > > > I think we’ve spent a lot of time trying to conflate two different (but > very real) problems just because they were conflated in MARC/AACR2. > > > > Ralph > > > -- > Karen [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net > m: +1-510-435-8234 > skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600 > >