Date: Fri, 8 Jul 94 08:47:18 PDT
From: sallyh@Ludwig.intel.com (Sally Hambridge)
Message-Id: <9407081547.AA17037@Ludwig.intel.com>
To: ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu, uri@bunyip.com
Subject: URC Author Section
Micheal - In general, the URC draft is very nice. I do have one
quarrel, and I think it's larger than nit-sized.
I suppose it's the librarian in me coming out, but I really have a
problem with this construction of the author's name. Suppose I have a
client, and I request that it fetch me URC's with the subject of
"Shakespeare" and then sort those by the author's last name. Given
this construction, how does the software figure out what the last name
is?
One of the reasons librarians have agonized over figuring out who the
author is and getting names in a standard format is for just this reason:
to provide a sorting mechanism when searching and retrieving by something
other than author's last name.
> o Author:
> This pair will encode the name of the Author of a given document or
> resource. Since many cultures have different ways of writing names
> there are no requirements on how a name should be written. Thus it is
> encouraged that users encode names in the most common format i.e.
> first, middle and last in English societies.
> Example:
> Author: Michael Mealling
We might want to consider standard library ways of representing
names (gasp!), or if that's too conservative, what about the ISO
construct of Family Name and Given Name?
Using standard library construction (whatever is standard to each country)
should also answer Jim Davis's concern about multiple authors and corporate
authors. I'd hate to see us agonize over creating a code for every
contingency (esp. since librarians have already done this) but I believe
this area requires more thought.
Sally
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