Editor as Contributor

jverber
I've noticed that when scraping from the Library of Congress, and other places too, edited volumes end up with the editors listed as "Contributors" rather than "Editors," something I then have to change manually each time.
  • peterm
    I'm a bit puzzled about editors. When I try to add a book section by hand, I can add authors of the book section, but I don't see a field for the editors of the book, which is information that must be reported in most bibliographic styles. When I added a book by hand and switched to book section style, I get a list of contributors, but still no field for editors.
  • peterm
    Oops, nevermind, I see that there's a hard to see tab control that allows someone to switch the mode of the field from author to contributor or editor. Now if I only knew what the differences were between these....
  • kat
    oh, thanks peterm - I was having the same problem.
  • mutlu_inek
    It seems noone hase properly read jverber's message. S/he complains about downloading records from library websites and a misrecognition of fields. This is a serious issue and still the case. If you download record from for example the Library of Congress, the editor is _never_ imported as an editor. It usually becomes a 'contributor', in case of several editors, we suddenly have a mixture of 'authors' and 'contributors'. This is not only not accurate, but a major bug in the software! I hope this will be addressed.
  • Tjowens
    Thanks Mutlu_inek

    Just to clarify. This is sadly not a case of mis recognition of fields, but more a case of ambiguity in MARC records. In most cases editors in the LOC are listed in the 700 field. This field merely signifies Added Entry - Personal Name. Someone listed here could be a contributor in several ways, that is why they are listed as a contributer. It is somewhat amazing that in the 999 fields of MARC there is no field for "editor". MARC was not originally created for this purpose, and given that it works incredibly well.

    For the time being it is always a good habit to double check what you have scraped.

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