(no subject)

[arethinn]

Current amusing discussion on AUTOCAT: Whether to take a book claiming to have been published on Pluto at its word and put that information in the publication data field, as RDA specifies to do (on the principle that we should describe the resource according to how it represents itself), or whether to overrule that on the idea that a patron looking for that book is not likely to think of that situation, and put in what we know to be the real data. Extra flavor from discussion of whether celestial bodies other than Earth are considered places and have geographical subject headings (yes, even though the Greek root means "the Earth"), served with a soupçon of "Pluto isn't a planet" (natch), which was deemed irrelevant to whether it could be considered a place for the purposes of having a publisher based there.

Just amused at the whimsical and slightly esoteric discussions that go on when talking about modelling the bibliographic universe, and how the tone wobbles back and forth from a bit wry to plain seriousness without any apparent awareness of the oddness of the example...

Comments

[digitalsidhe]

Does "the principle that we should describe the resource according to how it represents itself" take account for the idea that resources may deliberately describe themselves in inaccurate ways? Or does it assume honesty on their parts?

I agree that Pluto's non-planetary nature has no bearing on the debate; if it had claimed to be published on Deimos, Vesta, or Babylon 5, planeticity wouldn't even have come up.

[arethinn]

Certain parts of the data are designated "transcribed", i.e., record them exactly as they appear even if that data is faulty (typos, etc) or known to be fictitious (e.g., The Tales of Beedle the Bard presents itself as having been translated by Hermione Granger). Then, a correction or additional information may be added elsewhere, if judged "important for identification or access."

Someone else's reply about this:

I do think that data presented (print equivalent of tagged) as publication data, whether fictitious or not, belong in the appropriate area of the record, just as the actual data do. Only thus is it possible to search specifically for records which have the specific fictitious data so presented, even without knowing the true facts of publication. Likewise, having "actual" data in the right place enables efficient searching by place, imprint, and date.

Sometimes I want to see things that claim to have been published in "Utopia", even if it was really Dubuque--and conversely, everything published in Dubuque, even though some say "Utopia".

*That's* good metadata: "Data associated with objects which relieves their potential users of having to have full knowledge of their existence and characteristics" (J. Milstead and S. Feldman, "Metadata: Cataloging by Any Other Name," in *Online*, Jan. 1999)

I think the person who said the OP could not use Pluto as a place of publication because it wasn't a planet was really just joking, but it's sort of the point of this post - off-the-cuff remarks like that often lead to sober discussion of the example.