[Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

[ajh@cvt.dk]

Hi everybody - the point of author "weighting" is also a applied in the
"ranking" of authors and hereby researchers. Dealing with research
databases this topic has popped up again and again. The result is now,
that the first author is in charge of catalogging, however all authors are
equal in weight.Hence the recommendation below can also be used for such purpose and
therefore I agree in such a solution.
Alfred
Techn. University of Denmark
Center for Knowledge Technology

> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dspace-general mailing list
> Dspace-general at mit.edu
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general