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I'm glad to see authority records being brought up. Authority records, not bib records, have been the primary locus for dealing with language (and other) variants of terms, not bib resource descriptions and statements.

At the same time, authorities have been crafted to serve different language communities. An LCNAF authority can include variant forms in many languages and scripts, yet still be regarded as a useful set of variants for a primarily English-speaking community. In a context of multiple, community-oriented authority files, the language (or languages) of each term is less important than the language-orientation of the authority file.

That said, when we move beyond the use of authorized terms (as I think we will), there will be a need for coding to identify the language/script etc. of names and other terms in cluster vocabularies; but won't there also be a need to identify preferred terms for display in specified contexts, like a catalog with a primary user population? 

Cataloging has long embraced the use of vernacular terms in its descriptions. Maybe the desire to encode every term with language/script etc. specifications is an underestimation of the ability of most metadata users to understand a multilingual message.

Stephen

On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 9:14 AM, Osma Suominen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Karen!

According to Wikipedia [1] Orwell's book is "Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984". The article has a picture of the cover of the first edition which uses the spelled out name. So apparently both versions of the title are used in English language editions, but the long version was used in the first edition.

You're right that having catalogers choose the language for every field is probably asking too much. However, in most cases it should be possible to infer the language from other information in the record, so having catalogers explicitly tag the language may not be necessary as long as the cataloging system is smart enough - for example defaulting the language of most fields to the language of the work. Problems arise e.g. in situations when there are multiple titles in different languages. Then it would be good to have an explicit language tagging mechanism.

I wonder if LOC has considered language tagging in their BIBFRAME pilots?

Also, authority records currently are very problematic. In our corporate name authority we currently have the following alternative names for the City of Helsinki ("Helsingin kaupunki" in Finnish):

City of Helsinki
Elsínkia
He'lssen
Heilsincí
Helsig
Helsingfors
Helsingfors stad
Helsingi
Helsingia
Helsingjafoss
Helsingki
Helsink
Helsinki
Helsinkis
Helsinko
Helsinky
Helsinqui
Helsset
Helsínquia
Hen-xin-ki
Hèlsinki
Stadt Helsinki
Ville d'Helsinki
Ȟel'sinki
Хельсинки

These are all just names in the 410a field, with no information about the language of each. It's quite awkward to deal with this outside the MARC records, since we don't know which names to display in which situations. For example the English language name should probably be preferred when displaying the information within an English language UI. To my knowledge, there is no way of indicating the language of a name in 4xx fields of authority records. It would be very useful to be able to tag them with languages, though it would take a lot of work to go through all the existing records and add the language information.

-Osma

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four


Karen Coyle kirjoitti 22.12.2017 klo 16:42:
Osma, I took all of those examples of 1984 from LoC's catalog. While
Wikidata may think they have different titles, we don't know how that
decision was made (there are no cataloging rules for Wikidata). In no
case have I seen "Nineteen Eighty-Four" for the English version
(although it was filed that way in card catalogs as per the ALA Filing
Rules). Your examples all conveniently prove your point, but I still
think that asking catalogers to determine the language of every field is
going to create difficulties. It would be a good idea to take a sampling
of records and try this out. From the cataloger's point of view.

kc

On 12/21/17 7:44 AM, Osma Suominen wrote:
However, there is a big problem with trying to attribute
*language* to fields in bibliographic data. It only takes a few examples
to understand why:

Title:
1984 (book in German)
1984 (book in Hebrew)
1984 (book in English)

I don't think that's a problem at all. In fact this is a great example,
since the name of Orwell's novel (assuming you meant it) actually
differs between many languages. According to Wikidata
(http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q208460) it is called

"1984" in German
"1984" in Hebrew (but rendered with right-to-left alignment!)
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" in English (not 1984!)
"Vuonna 1984" in Finnish
"নাইন্টিন এইটি-ফোর" in Bengali



--
Osma Suominen
D.Sc. (Tech), Information Systems Specialist
National Library of Finland
P.O. Box 26 (Kaikukatu 4)
00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Tel. +358 50 3199529
[log in to unmask]
http://www.nationallibrary.fi



--
Stephen Hearn, Metadata Strategist
Data Management & Access, University Libraries
University of Minnesota
170A Wilson Library (office)
160 Wilson Library (mail)
309 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Ph: 612-625-2328
Fx: 612-625-3428
ORCID:  0000-0002-3590-1242