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Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 20:25:42 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: AP Question
From: "Diane Ileana Hillmann" <dih1@cornell.edu>
To: "Tom Baker" <baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de>
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I'd like to bring a couple of AP issues to your attention,
based on recent discussions with the DC-Ed AP Drafting
Committee as well as a result of my just-ended workshop on
APs in Canada.  I know you're involved with the revision of
the CEN Guidelines and I trust you will forward these comments
on to others interested in these issues.

The issue has to do with the terms used to specify obligation
in an AP.  Like many developing APs, we've copied much from the
Libraries AP, including their terms and codes for obligation.
After coming back from my vacation in France (with considerably
fewer brain cells than I began with) I looked at our AP and
started seeing "R" as Required (neglecting to look at what
we'd copied over as a key) and the confusion from that caused
me to look a bit more closely at what we'd cut and pasted.
It became clear to me that the DC-Lib group had imported
those terms and codes from MARC, and there were two issues
that started to jell:

1. There seems no other places in the AP that codes are used,
   and given my own brain fog it started to seem like a bad idea
   to use codes rather than terms. For catalog librarians these
   codes are second nature; for others, not so.

2. Once I started thinking about the terms, it became obvious
   that what we were dealing with here was a small controlled
   vocabulary, with terms that we hadn't given much thought to
   as we incorporated them.

I started asking myself whether this was the right set of
terms to begin with, and whether it might make sense to ask
you about whether any notion of standardizing obligation terms
might be part of the work being attempted as the Guidelines
are reviewed.

Now, having spent three days talking about APs (and nothing
but APs) with a small group of very savvy and engaged folks,
I'm more and more convinced that this issue is an important
one. For instance, one of the participants wanted to include
in his AP terms to describe:

A.  Information that might be carried if received from others
    but not necessarily sought prospectively

B. Information that will not be used, neither stored nor
   accepted (particularly if it might be pernicious or
   misleading in a particular context).

Maybe because it was the end of a long day, but I couldn't
figure out why not, and this lead me to think that the issue
might benefit from further discussion.

I'd appreciate any insights you might offer on these issues,
particularly the one concerning codes vs. terms, as we'd like
to get that one straight before moving ahead (and it might
be an easier one, on the whole!)