[Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

[David Goodman]

Library catalogers have spent 130 years trying to decide this. Until the 1960s there was total disagreement between different countries.Now there is  agreement that (in D-space terminology) if there are 3 or fewer co-authors, and no principle author is indicated, the creator is the first, and the other 2 are contributors. If there are more than three, and no principal one is indicated, there is no creator and all of them are contributors. 
This simple (but irrational) rule requires several hundred pages of text and commentary to deal with all the exceptions and special cases, with changes and additional commentary every three months. And there is with an authoritative organization to make the amendments, involving dozens of people in an elaborate multi-committee structure, and every modification is argued at great length.

I recommend that we do nothing of the sort. Those rules are based upon the legacy of card catalogs, with a single card for each item, and require  specialized professionals having decades of experience to apply them.  I would recommend that everyone named be a contributor; if there is only one author or a principal one is indicated, that name also goes in the creator field as well. The different types of contributor fields do no harm; they would normally be combined in a search. I think this would be robust, in the sense that if were applied differently or wrongly, a search would still find the item.  I'm a librarian. I have a bias to think that in most things our practices make a good precedent, but this is not one of them.  . 

Source has been used with so many meanings that I think the original idea of eliminating it altogether remains a good one. Using it is not robust, because is something that should have been in one of the other fields is entered there instead, it will not be found. If it is used, it should be only as a duplicate of an entry in one of the other fields. 

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman at liu.edu

(and, formerly: Princeton University Library)


-----Original Message-----
From:	dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu on behalf of Margret Branschofsky
Sent:	Mon 6/21/2004 11:47 AM
To:	dp007; dspace-general at mit.edu
Cc:	
Subject:	Re: [Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

DSpace uses the Contributor element instead of the Creator element because 
this relieves the user of the burden of deciding who, of all the people 
involved in the production of an item, is "primarily responsible" in the 
creation of the item.  We added roles to contributor, thinking that was 
more specific than the vague "creator" field.  So we have Contributor. 
author, Contributor.editor, Contributor.illustrator...etc.  And if anyone 
wants to leave it vague, they can use the unqualified Contributor field.

Our guide in this decision was the Libraries Application Profile (LAP) of 
the Dublin Core, which was in an early draft stage at the time of DSpace 
launching.  This draft conflated the Contributor and Creator elements into 
one. When the DC Libraries Group published the present draft of the LAP 
(officially called DC-Lib), the contributor and creator elements reappeared 
as separate elements. However, there is a comment under both of these 
elements that states "Creator and Contributor may be conflated if desired 
by the application".

We left Creator in our schema only because we anticipated that we might in 
the future harvest metadata that contains values in the Creator element, 
and we wanted to be able to accept that information.

As time goes by we see that this decision is proving to be somewhat 
inconvenient for metadata harvesters.

As for Source, at the time of DSpace launching the LAP (and also the DCMI) 
were counseling people not to use Source because it had been mis-used by 
some applications, in their opinion.    Since then I have seen its use 
being recommended again, so it might be time for us to change that line in 
our guidelines.  This would be fairly simple.  Changing Creator/Contributor 
would be more complicated.

This is the historical explanation.  I'd love to hear more comments about 
how to proceed in light of developments to date.

Margret Branschofsky
DSpace User Support Manager
Digital Library Research Group
Bldg. 14S-M24
(617)253-1293
margretb at mit.edu
http://dspace.mit.edu


At 02:48 AM 6/21/2004 +0550, dp007 wrote:
>hi all,
>
>dspace recommends not to use the metadata creator and source. it
>says "only for harvested metadata". can anyone explain this?
>
>thanks in advance,
>regards,
>dp
>_______________________________________________
>Dspace-general mailing list
>Dspace-general at mit.edu
>http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general

Margret Branschofsky
DSpace User Support Manager
Digital Library Research Group
Bldg. 14S-M24
(617)253-1293
margretb at mit.edu
http://dspace.mit.edu