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On 31/07/11 03:20, Karen Coyle wrote: > My main question is why we need a specific format for this, but I think > it is needed because there are particular sharing goals that would > involve ebook publishers, and it had to work in Atom. Personally I think > that we have plenty of bib metadata already, and it's pretty well > understood. Perhaps I am wrong about that. It does make me nervous when > I see formats that are designed only for books, with elements like > "author". Someone is going to want to use this for some other format, > for sure, and we'll end up with painters and composers and inventors all > coded as "author." It doesn't make sense to me to create > book-centric/exclusive metadata, but in this case that reflects the > industry that is directly involved, book publishing. > > Which brings me to .... I've been involved in various groups that have > members who are championing a particular set of information resources > that they care deeply about -- often segments of academic publishing. > They create metadata schemas that work great for their area of interest > but they often think that it's just a matter of extending that metadata > to cover other interests. I don't think it works that way, or at least > that's not the best way to do things. I look at BIBO,[1] which has no > elements for sound or movie materials, and that lists "map" as a form of > illustration. This latter obviously would not reflect the view of > geography professionals who consider maps the meat of their work not a > mere illustration. The particular value that I see in library metadata > is the lack of self-interest and the attempt (achieved or not) of > treating all resources equally. The 'big picture' view of library > metadata is not understood, and I've heard folks complain that library > metadata doesn't reflect their viewpoint. I haven't yet figured out how > to explain this to them. Ed Summers mentioned a call for a manifesto for > linked data in his blog,[2] I'd like a manifesto for library cataloging > -- something very short that explains the basic philosophy, and that > doesn't use the term 'books' anywhere. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm waiting for RDA (see http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/ ) in the hope that it solves all our representation problems. We may then have to map it to our various encodings (XML, XMLMARC, BibTeX, BST, RDF, ...), of course. cheers stuart -- Stuart Yeates Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/