<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Information from Christine Straitt at ESTC:<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">In the late 1990s, she was told that they were inserted for tracking purposes by the BL. There were similar ones from EEBO, encountered while she was working on the Huntington Wing team from 10/1997 through 5/1999. They were mostly in unedited UMI records. The team was supposed to verify those items on the films belonging to the Huntington, edit those records comparing the filmed copy to the copy in hand, and then remove the “Dummy …” note, but to ignore the note in any other records.<div class=""><div><br class=""></div><div>They don’t now seem to serve any purpose. The notes don’t survive in the current ESTC data base; only in local OPACs, apparently in records downloaded from ESTC/RLIN long ago.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I hope this helps.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>John</div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Nov 27, 2018, at 5:37 PM, Erin Blake <<a href="mailto:erin.blake.folger@gmail.com" class="">erin.blake.folger@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">The label "Dummy" follows immediately after the 500$a in many older ESTC records (including a bunch of legacy records in our OPAC, imported from RLIN in the olden days), and the next word always begins with a capital letter, so it's evidently a label of some sort.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Does anyone know why "Dummy" was used this way? </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If you do a Google search on the phrase "Dummy reproduction of the original in" you can find a slew of them (including in EEBO-TCP bibliographic descriptions, but not EEBO, so the records have been cleaned up).<br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Background: a researcher asked what "Dummy" means in a library context, and I was about to explain shelf dummies (place-holders on the shelf for a book semi-permanently shelved somewhere else) and dummies in the sense of model books (salesmen's dummies, publisher's dummies, etc.). Then I looked at the context, and that's clearly not what's going on here.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks!</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Erin.</div><div class=""><div class=""><span style="font-size:11pt" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><a class=""><span style="font-size:7.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif" class=""><font class="">----------------<br class="">
Erin Blake, Ph.D. | Senior Cataloger | Folger
Shakespeare Library | 201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC,
20003 | eblake@folger.edu | office tel. +1
202-675-0323 | www.folger.edu</font></span></a><span style="font-size:11pt" class=""></span></p></div></div>
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