BIBFRAME Cataloging in multiple schemas

Posting to Bibframe

On 2/8/2016 8:03 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
This brings to mind something that I have often heard Diane Hillmann say: that catalogers do not talk in terms of AACR (or now, RDA) rules, but instead they speak “MARC”. This of course is a confusion of the content and the carrier, something we should be more carefully aware of. To consider yourself cataloging in BIBFRAME would be making the same mistake. The cataloging rules are RDA or ISBD or DACS (etc.), and that determines the content of the catalog entry. The carrier is MARC or BIBFRAME or ISBD or any number of other possible data carriers. It should be possible to transport our data in a variety of carriers, and to define a variety of profiles for different uses. We do need to be able to catalog in all of the detail of our rules, even if many applications use only a portion of that detail.

I don’t think I agree with this. When catalogers speak, they speak primarily in terms of rules and procedures, not so much in terms of MARC. A quick review of Autocat or RDA shows this. When catalogers do use MARC, it is more of a shorthand for the rules, e.g. they might use 245$b in place of typing out “other title information”.

What catalogers do not talk about is rules other than their own. Occasionally, catalogers might bring up other, related cataloging rules that are still library-based, e.g. rare books, but they almost never discuss how non-library related sets of rules, e.g. Onix, handles a bibliographic concept. When the universe is widened even further, for instance in the case of author-created metadata, no discussions at all take place. In my opinion, this is highly unfortunate since library records will be encountered more and more often outside of the traditional library systems–after all, that is one of the main purposes of linked data–and catalogers should concern themselves with making their records coherent in those settings.

A single example of what I mean is: how do we make a subject heading such as this:

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881–Homes and haunts–Russia (Federation)–Novokuznet︠s︡k.

which is both useful and coherent when it is within the library catalog, but when taken out (as here) becomes something very strange. Absolutely nobody (except for a library cataloger) would ever think to look up anything like this. How do we make this type of bibliographic oddity less bizarre in the linked data universe?

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One Comment

  1. WilliamDymn said:

    Say, you got a nice forum.Thanks Again. Really Great.

    May 6, 2016

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