Topic 4. Transcription (revised options)

[Robert L. Maxwell]

At 04:58 PM 1/26/99 -0500, Stephen Young wrote:
>As regards New option "2. Do a vice versa: 245 as printed and 246 as
>conversion," this is essentially what was done with many of the earlier
>Beinecke Library records that are now reconned. Robert Babcock, the curator
>of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Library, has complained
>about the displays resulting from that option. Easily predictable
>standardized 245's (resulting from the application of LCRI 1.0E, as called
>for in revised option 3) would create better displays from now on, but
>would not correct the problems resulting from recon.

I think the existence of large bodies of reconned records is an issue we
need to consider in this discussion. Actually, I would like to introduce
the issue of recon cleanup. We have large amounts of reconned records for
rare books and one of the things I do in my daily (well, O.K., weekly or
so) routine is to look through these records and try to make sense of them,
correcting them if possible. Most of them were reconned from old pre-AACR2,
pre-DCRB cards, and I do try to smooth them out, to make them display more
sensibly. But obviously this is a problem with DCRB 0H, since I usually do
not have the book in hand but am just going through the catalog looking for
problems. Recon cleanup is a fact of life here (and I imagine elsewhere)
and will be ongoing for a long time, but unless we want to completely
recatalog the collection item by item we are not able to do cleanup with
book in hand. I must admit this is one reason I am urging "easily
predictable standardized 245's", so that we can somehow regularize the
records in our collections, that were done under many different standards,
without having to retrieve the items themselves (or with as little of that
as possible).

By the way, I am not proposing coding cleaned up records, done without book
in hand, dcrm. I would like a standard in dcrm, though, that allows cleaned
up, regularized records to harmonize with records cataloged and transcribed
under dcrm.

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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