Topic 4. Transcription

[Robert L. Maxwell]

>As I see it, the options are:
>
>1. Leave it like it is.
>
>	EX.  245 10 Advice from a country judge.
>	
>		[Printed as: ADUICE FROM A COUNTRY 		IUDGE]	
>
>2. Leave it like it is and add a statement to enter a 246 (variant of
title) in the manner in which printed (which is what many libraries do
already):
>
>	EX. 245 10 Advice from a country judge.
>	      246 3_ Aduice from a country iudge
>
>3. Do a vice versa: 245 as printed and 246 as conversion.
>
>	EX. 245 10 Aduice from a country iudge.
>	      246 3_ Advice from a country judge
>

Please add option 4: Transcribe according to a regular, predictable method
[which dcrb is NOT], such as the LCRI (1.0E) or the "solution of last
resort" in OH. I think we need to seriously consider such an option for
several reasons:

 1. Patrick's point about the way these things sort in library systems.
Especially for titles that are used frequently (either containing common
terms or for works that have been issued in many editions), both dcrb
transcribed titles and exact transcriptions give an entirely arbitrary sort
order in title searches. Same titles should sort together, shouldn't they,
independent of the vagaries of printers' preferences of u's and v's and
catalogers' guesses about those preferences?

 2. Predictability. DCRB's transcription rules are almost entirely
unpredictable to the user who does not have the book in hand (which is
after all why he/she is searching the catalog). How is one to guess what
the printer's practice was without having the book in hand, even if we are
able to assume that a given user happens to know that is what he/she is
supposed to be looking for? One virtue of the LCRI is that it is entirely
predictable. The user who knows it knows exactly what search string to
enter. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to search titles in RLIN
over and over again, imagining all possible variant transcriptions, before
finding the record for a given book. And the LCRI seems to be a fairly
intuitive method. I asked several colleagues here in the Classics Dept. to
transcribe various title pages and they almost always came up with a
transcription that fit the LCRI. (I do not favor the 0H "last resort"
because it seems excessively complicated and is an unusual way of
transcribing--none of my Classics Dept. "guinea pigs" came even close to it.)

 3. DCRM for later materials. One of the points of the revision is to
consider expanding DCRB to a DCRM that will include rules for cataloging of
19th century and later materials. Yet here we will hit the LCRI head on,
since up to now u/v i/j in post-1800 materials will have been transcribed
according to the LCRI. So we will have records for the same item with
varying title transcriptions, depending on whether they were done under
AACR2/LCRI or under DCRM, if the old DCRB rule is retained (or more
particularly if a rule requiring exact transcription is adopted).

Although we have not all weighed in on the principles I proposed earlier, I
haven't heard any opposition, so I would like to cite Principle I: Does the
rule contribute to the Paris Principle 2.1 identification function of the
catalog? I am convinced that the current DCRB transcription rule does not
help a user identify whether the library owns a particular item, since it
neither calls for exact transcription nor a predictable transcription rule.
The user unaware of DCRB 0H might well miss entirely the existence of an
item owned by the library, particularly in systems (such as RLIN) that are
unforgiving, in which the user has to enter the search exactly or gets no
hits.

I am not terribly convinced by the argument that we should not change the
transcription rule because we have a lot of dcrb records out there already.
There are probably actually many more records that have NOT been
transcribed according to dcrb. I truly feel that the dcrb rule is a bad one
and should not be perpetuated. 

If we were to vote, I would vote for option 4, with the LCRI; if not 4 I
would be willing to go with an exact transcription (though I would like to
see a lot of records done that way before agreeing--somehow I have the
feeling they will look funny and be difficult to read, and besides they
would still have the sorting problem detailed above)--but do we mean
"exact" with the exception that we will lower-case the letters that need to
be lower-cased? Or should we be REALLY exact and transcribe caps as caps?
My last choice would be to retain the current dcrb transcription rule. If
that turns out to be the chosen option, though, we really MUST insist that
various transcriptions, including an exact one and one done according to
the LCRI, be provided in the 246.

To change the topic slightly, 0H and the LCRI to 1.0E both call for
separating ligatures with the exception of oe in French; and ae in Danish
(LCRI), or oe or ae in Scandinavian languages (DCRB). Why is this
distinction being made? As this message demonstrates, many systems,
including this e-mail system, can't handle any ligatures. Furthermore most
systems index these ligatures exactly as though they had been split (and
though I don't have the ALA filing rules to hand, isn't that how the Filing
Rules calls for filing ligatures?). So what is the interest in making these
narrow exceptions to the general rule that ligatures should be split out?
Does it advance the purposes of the catalog?

Bob
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Robert L. Maxwell
Special Collections and Ancient Languages Cataloger
6428 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 378-5568
robert_maxwell at byu.edu
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