Hickey and Coyle on relators
Thom Hickey posted Relator Codes and Terms late last month, about MARC relator codes, which “allow the relationship between a name and a work to be designated by codes in the MARC record.”
Karen Coyle followed up last week with Relators. She says:
Thom Hickey did a study of relator codes and relator names ($4 v. $e), which he reported in his blog, and came up with the figures below. His interest was in the interaction between the code and the name. Since his study was done in the OCLC WorldCat catalog, I think it points out that these key roles are not being coded in our records, which essentially results in a lot of false hits for our users. If we can’t get these simple relationships coded into our data today, what hope do we have for a relationship-oriented bibliographic view in the future?
A good question. Better and easier cataloguing tools that help identify these relationships will help. Doing that, and making the best use of the existing defined relationships, will be part of OpenFRBR.