<font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif"><div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 15px; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); ">Re: "2 unnumbered pages, iv pages, 1 unnumbered page, iv-xvii pages, 3 unnumbered pages, 348, that is, 332 pages, 6 unnumbered pages, 24 pages, 2 unnumbered pages."</span></font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif"><br></font></font></div>It goes a bit beyond "I don't like it", though I'm glad for the moral support. It's really that people who don't care in the first place will be confirmed in their intention to pay no attention whatever to such a mess of verbiage; whereas the people who do care about these sometimes vital details and want us to communicate them clearly and succinctly will, in their justified frustration, think of us as perfect fools. Who on earth that deals with books at all is incapable of understanding "p."? For the love of Mike, these conventions are a triumph of sorts: simple and elegant tools that took us a long time to develop.</font></font><div>
<font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif"><br></font></font></div><div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif">I've engaged 25 groups of people at Rare Book School, so far, in the art of describing complex bibliographical phenomena as clearly and simply as possible, and in this respect RDA is obtuse and altogether retrograde. It's not simplification--it's patronizing. "The poor dears won't understand unless we spell it all out". Or is this the best way to make us stop accounting for this information? It <i>does</i> look bad; well then, don't do it at all.</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif"><br></font></font></div><div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif">It may have been true that "one of the principles underlying DCRM [is that] the rare rules won’t depart from the general rules unless there is a rare materials reason to do so". We need to revisit just what that principle really means. Our proper work is dealing with the difficult cases, and we can't do our work properly with such clumsy tools. In the absence of that work, dealing with such materials as we do, FRBR will be a perfect sham.</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif"><br></font></font></div><div><font size="4"><font face="garamond,serif">Sorry for the rant. I hadn't realized that despair comes in such small packages.</font></font></div>
<div><font><font></font></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="garamond, serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br></span></font><div><font face="'courier new', monospace">RICHARD NOBLE : RARE BOOKS CATALOGER : JOHN HAY LIBRARY : BROWN UNIVERSITY<br>
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912 : 401-863-1187/FAX 863-3384 : <a href="mailto:RICHARD_NOBLE@BROWN.EDU" target="_blank">RICHARD_NOBLE@BROWN.EDU</a> </font><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Robert Maxwell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:robert_maxwell@byu.edu">robert_maxwell@byu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:#1F497D">Some thoughts on Richard’s thoughts </span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Wingdings;color:#1F497D">J</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:#1F497D"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); "> </span></p><div><div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:#1F497D">2 unnumbered pages, iv pages, 1 unnumbered page, iv-xvii pages,
3 unnumbered pages, 348, that is, 332 pages, 6 unnumbered pages, 24 pages, 2 unnumbered
pages.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:#1F497D"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:#1F497D">I agree that this RDA result is awful and I don’t like it.
However, again, there isn’t any rare materials reason why the general
rule shouldn’t be applied to rare materials, and remember that that is
one of the principals underlying DCRM (the rare rules won’t depart from
the general rules unless there is a rare materials reason to do so). “I
don’t like it” doesn’t cut it as a reason for differing. We
will no doubt under our rare rules continue to insist that every leaf be
counted, which will differ from RDA for rare materials reasons, but there is no
rare reason that we can insist on different <i>conventions</i> for counting (e.g.
“unnumbered” instead of bracketing) the pages we <i>do</i> choose
to count.</span></p></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div></div></div>