Date:         Thu, 4 Dec 2003 10:11:34 -0800
Reply-To:     Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
Sender:       Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
From:         Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: genres and governments records
Comments: To: Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
In-Reply-To:  <[log in to unmask]>
Content-Type: text/plain

On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 17:32, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

>
> There's nothing equivalent for either magazine or journal articles.
> While recognizing your genres-are-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder point, it
> seems to me these are more "useful" than, for example, "font" or
> "game."

As you can tell, the genres in MARC were based on actual items in
libraries. (Note: games and kits were fairly common items in school
libraries and public libraries. Educational, of course.) Journal
articles were rarely individually cataloged by libraries and were
considered covered by the Leader code for "analytic" (i.e. a part of an
item).

Adding something that means: "individual item in a serial publication"
covers a kind of structural need. I know that the system that I worked
on needed this to correctly derive certain kinds of displays. It's
something else to assign genres that are more content oriented: review
article, editorial, etc. Do you feel that you lack a statement of the
bibliographic structure, or of the genre?

I still think we need to consider how we anticipate using these genres.
If we are thinking of them as something helpful to display to users of
the metadata, and that there can be more than one on a record, then we
should have the list be pretty loose. If we consider these to be a
single, definitive statement of the content that might trigger some
difference in processing, then the list should be tighter and we should
avoid ambiguous categories. If we are seeing them as bibliographic
structure, then that's an entirely different list.
--
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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