[Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

Tue Jun 22 15:03:26 EDT 2004

(note:all the below is not strictly relevant to the actual question.)

Alfred, as you say, there are many studies where it has been used for such purposes, and I am not sure any of them are valid.

There are many possible meanings to "principal author." 
Usually it means 
a/ the person whose project it "is", in the sense of the work 
  done for a thesis,
But the term can mean:
b/ The person who conceived the project,
c/ the person who did most of the work,
d/ the person who did most of the writing,
e/ the person whose grant paid for the work, 
f/ the person responsible for this project in a large laboratory 
  doing many projects
g1/ the person with the highest rank (which is usually the same as
g2/ the person with authority over the others, 
g3/ or the director of the laboratory. 

In most cases, the principal author (in whatever sense) places his name first.
In the traditional master-and-students organization, tradionally the principal author in sense g/places his name first, followed by the one in sense  a/, 
 but now often the principal author in sense a/ is first and the one in sense g/ goes last.  

The practices here vary from subject to subject and from group to group. James Watson, for example, usually did not put his name on his students' papers at all. Everyone understood he was a joint author of anything in moleculat biology coming from "the Biological laboratory at Harvard." -- see his book Genes, girls, and Gamow : after the double helix / James Watson,  2002.
Usually the principal author -- in whatever sense -- is indicated as the one "to whom correspondance should be addressed" in the conventional footnote to the list of authors. 

This does not even consider the various practices with collaborative projects between different laboratory groups, or an ad hoc collaboration between two individuals. To resolve this, many multi-author projects list the names alphabeticaly (and generally say so).

In medicine, some journals now insist that there be a footnote listing specifically the roles of the different authors.  
Some instruction to authors even specify that those playing only a technical role are not authors, and that every author who is listed has at least read the manuscript. There have been disputes--sometimes to the level of allegations of scientific misconduct and legal suits, about who is entitled to be listed, and where. 

All this means, exactly as Alfred says, that in our case of self-indexing, each author group has the opportunity to do what it wants and may or may not designate someone if it pleases.  How it decides gets us back to all the considerations above.
How the relationships function belongs to the field of sociology of science; what the were in a given case, to the history of science. 
The only thing I want to caution is that the use of such data for citation analysis is not clear-cut. If one is doing a large study and cannot analyze each case, it is equally valid to take all the authors as equal, or divide the responsibility unequally. If the number were small enough, I would look for the "author to whom correspondance should be addressed" indicator. 

But we do not have to worry about all the above for our present purposes.
 Each group may, as usual, do what it chooses. 

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 ajh at cvt.dk
Sent:	Tue 6/22/2004 3:25 AM
To:	dspace-general at mit.edu
Cc:	
Subject:	RE: [Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

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

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