Date:         Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:16:57 -0500
Reply-To:     Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
Sender:       Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
From:         James Howison <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: alternate personal names in MODS?
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In-Reply-To:  <[log in to unmask]>
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On Nov 22, 2005, at 10:26 AM, Marc Truitt wrote:

> Bruce and James,
>
> Actually, I think 'sensible' is a better descriptor than 'arcane'.   
> I have no illusions that I can explain it more clearly than has  
> Barbara Tillett in her posting, but perhaps this may help...
>
> Think of it from a database design perspective.  If you view books  
> and persons who have some responsibility for them ('authors', for  
> brevity's sake) as database objects, of which object (the book or  
> the author) is the name 'Mark Twain' more properly an attribute?   
> The book _Tom Sawyer_ or the person who also has the name 'Samuel  
> Clemens'?  The 'arcane cataloguing practice' of authority control  
> is designed so that the reader needn't know under what name Clemens  
> wrote _Tom Sawyer_ (or any other of his numerous works).  If you  
> regard the name as an attribute of the work, then you would either  
> have to append every known variant name to each of his work objects  
> or else you would have to settle for knowing in advance which  
> variant name went with which work object, would you not?

Thanks Barbara, Bruce and Marc,

I thought it was likely MADS.  I'm probably missing something because  
it seems to me that there really isn't a big difference in what both  
are saying: is it not sensible to think that MADS encodes the  
'person' object (and thus contains the separate names)?  Thus, again  
in database terms, MADS is the lookup table for the various forms of  
the name (but there's no 'person_id' as a MADS primary key and a MODS  
foreign key, as makes sense for XML'ized dbs).

But in that case is it possible to create a MODS record with an  
embedded MADS style 'Person' object, (eg http://www.loc.gov/standards/ 
mads/mads-name.xml)? Or is the 'lookup' meant to work simply by  
searching a database for a MADS record with a name that matches the  
name part in a MODS record?

So if one had a citation style which wanted to incorporate a  
particular type of alternate name (eg Nickname) then one would have  
to code logic to search MADS records for each namePart to see if the  
nickname existed, grab it and output it as part of the formatted  
citation?

When an author is composing their documents, or a publisher  
publishing metadata for the object, or a cataloguer cataloguing,  
would they take the reference that I gave:

Ping Zhang and Na (Lina) Li (2005). The intellectual development of  
human-computer interaction research: A critical assessment of the MIS  
literature (1990–2002). Journal of the Association for Information  
Systems (JAIS), 6(11):227–292.

(assuming someone other than the author is doing the work and has a  
way of knowing that the bracketed part is an alternate name form)

And create a single MODS record, then search for a MADS record with a  
form that matches Na Li and add 'Lina' as an alternate form (if it  
doesn't exist).

Seems to me that authors should make their own MADS records  
available ... is there a harvesting system (a la OAI metadata  
harvesting?)

Thanks all,
James