With Day One of RDA Authorities coming up soon (March 31, 2013), we are exploring enhanced functionality for certain fields. http://metadataregistry.org/schemaprop/list/schema_id/4.html The Open Metadata Registry lists around 250 entries for RDA Roles. We distilled this 250-member group down to 126 distinct relator terms [abridger, actor, addressee, animator, annotator, appellant, appellee, architect, etc]. A lot of the terms had WEMI (Work, Element, Manifestation, Item) duplication, so we screened those out, which is how we ended up with 126 unique terms. However, we also looked at several of our clients that currently retain X00 $e (excluding 300 $e of course) within their bib records, whether those bibs are AACR2 or RDA. One client had 8 different types of X00 $e terms, though two of the terms [ill., illus.] appear to be the same type (illustrator vs illuminator). Another client had roughly 364 different types of X00 $e terms. But we noticed different spellings of the same type [aftist, aritst, arrist, artsit] which are most likely supposed to be (artist). So we wondered whether it would make sense to devise two separate lists for attempting to control relationship designators (X00 $e) in bib records: 1. One list of 126 (and growing) unique roles/designators as put forth by the Open Metadata Registry 2. One union list that is grown from different variations amongst our clients where some terms may or may not be part of the OMR list An example with #2 is that we found "attributed writer" in one of our client's records, though this is not present in the OMR list. It could be that this particular client prefers to retain this relationship designator rather than choose one of the current 126 designators from OMR instead. With either option, clients that wish to have some form of control applied to their X00 $e would have alternate spellings corrected to preferred terms for their ongoing current cataloging. List #2 would have more entries due to the sometimes subjective cataloging practice of RDA compared with AACR2. However, either list seems like it would be useful. We anticipate that we could employ this functionality in our current system very quickly, but we wanted to send this out and gather any comments (for or against) first. Please feel free to let us know what you think about this potential enhancement. Nate Cothran Vice President, Automation Services 533 East 1860 South Provo, Utah 84606 Phone: +1.800.288.1265, ext. 697 Direct: +1.801.342.5697 nate@bslw.com <mailto:nate@bslw.com?subject=Automation%20Services%20-%20Inquiry> * www.bslw.com
