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Deborah and list members,<br><br>
The question concerning non-roman alphabet signatures has not generated
much discussion here, and I regret that I cannot participate in the
discussion at the Midwinter meeting of BSC, but I wanted to offer a few
more remarks to my earlier comments.<br><br>
If one were to follow the draft suggestion for signatures in the Russian
alphabet, viz., using numerals to represent the gatherings, how can
one differentiate between upper and lower case? I do not know if it is
common in Russian early-imprints to differentiate between upper and lower
case in signatures or not and because the letters are so similar in upper
and lower case, it is probably not the case that upper and lower case
cyrillic letters are used in signatures the way they are in printing in
the Latin alphabet. I hope someone more knowledgeable in this area
could comment, but certainly we need to allow for such a differentiation
in other alphabets "without conventional names for the letters"
for which, it is being recommended, signatures would be recorded as
numerals.<br><br>
As I have mentioned in my e-mailed comments last week, I think the best
way of rendering these signaturesis in the original script and for
my own uses in our local database, I do that. Since we catalog on
OCLC, the Greek, Hebrew and Russian alphabets are not available for
insertion in the bibliographic records, and there I am reliant on
transliteration. My suggested revision would be: <br><br>
1) Give the letters in the original alphabet (as Bowers
recommends)<br><br>
2) Alternatively, where this is not possible, transliterate the letters
according to LC romanization.<br><br>
In the draft text, I would also like to recommend that where the
non-roman letters are used as numerals that this would be indicated by a
qualification after the word signatures, viz. Signatures (in Hebrew
alphabetic numeration) or Signatures (in Old Church Slavonic
alphabetic numeration) and the signatures could then be recorded as
the draft suggests by arabic numeration: 1-11 (superscript 4) or
whatever.<br><br>
Just one final note: having read the question on signatures as it is
formulated for discussion in your attachment, I myself cannot understand
how a statement: Signatures (in Greek) : A-G (superscript 6) could be
understood as anything other than three gatherings of 6 leaves. If
the signatures are in Greek (would it be better to say Greek alphabet),
how could G be the seventh letter? Someone not familiar with the
alphabets may need to get a chart of the alphabet, but I think one
could more easily figure out what the signatures are by transliterating
the letters than by using numeric notations.<br><br>
And personally, I do not see the need to write out the names of
the letters for Greek, Hebrew or Arabic even though these have been given
special treatment by using the names of the letters rather than the
transliteration of the letter or its numeric place in the
alphabet.<br><br>
Again, I hope others will comment on this, and I would like to learn the
result of any discussion at the midwinter meeting.<br><br>
Thanks for your attention,<br><br>
Joseph Ross<br>
Rare Books Cataloger<br>
University of Notre Dame<br><br>
<br>
At 04:34 PM 1/7/2005, Deborah J. Leslie wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Discussion questions for the
Bibliographic Standards Committee meeting in Boston next week are now
linked from the DCRM(B) draft main page, in a Microsoft Word version and
an HTML version. A record of the discussion will be contained in
the minutes for this meeting; I'll make an announcement when it's posted,
a month or two after the meeting. DCRM-L subscribers not attending the
BSC meeting are encouraged to engage in an online discussion of the
questions or other concerns.<br>
<br>
<font color="#610095"><a href="http://www.folger.edu/bsc/dcrb/dcrmtext.html">http://www.folger.edu/bsc/dcrb/dcrmtext.html</a><br>
</font> <br>
________________________________<br><br>
Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S.<br>
Head of Cataloging<br>
Folger Shakespeare Library<br>
201 East Capitol St., SE<br>
Washington, DC 20003<br>
202.675-0369<br>
<a href="mailto:djleslie@folger.edu">djleslie@folger.edu</a><br>
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