where to put extra details about contributors and creators

Written by Mary on Thursday, December 11, 2008

Thinking about what to do with additional (i.e., not standardized terms) info about creators and contributors.

A significant number of the titles we catalog have additional details about creators and contributors. I don't want to strip them out of the records... but I am not sure how to fit them in without either abandoning standardized terms or changing the PBCore structure.

So if I take this:
pbcoreCreator
creator: Virginia Steffen
creatorRole: Producer
pbcoreCreator

And turn it into this:


pbcoreCreator
creator: Virginia Steffen
creatorRole: Producer, "World's Largest Catsup Bottle"
pbcoreCreator

am I no longer compliant?

That would solve a lot of my problems, because I could also do:


pbcoreCreator
creator: Laurie, Hugh
creatorRole: Cast (Dr. Gregory House)
pbcoreCreator


pbcoreCreator
creator: Nevins, Sheila
creatorRole: Exective Producer, HBO
pbcoreCreator


alternative would be change to structure of PBCore
pbcoreCreator
creator: Nevins, Sheila
creatorRole: Executive producer
creatorRoleDetail: Affiliation
creatorDetail: HBO
pbcoreCreator

the addition to the schema would be optional, but are still bulky. And pretty ugly, I admit. But I want to fit the data in without stashing it way off somewhere in a notes field. How important, then, is using standard terms from the picklist?


Comments:

  • Dave Rice said on 12/11 at 10:52 AM

    PBCore states “Preference is to use a pre-defined list of contributor roles rather than entering informal, free-form text. Novel entries may be justified, however.”

    I find sticking to the list highly preferable as it greatly affects interoperability and potential programmatic use of these records. I like the idea of extending creator and contributor since your discussing values that aren’t really contributors or roles. When I was at Democracy Now I tested adding a controlled contributorAuthorityList to the implementation that listed name, title, etc so that when doing data entry I could select the name for the contributor value and it became associated with a name authority record that gave further information but this was outside PBCore.

    I notice that some PBCore users use the ‘Other’ value of the contributorRole picklist and append further info with a hyphen delimiter, thus “Other - Assistant to the Caterer”.

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