Transcription rules

[Grolier Club]

Dear All,

I advise this group to tread very, very carefully on the whole issue of
transcription. 

As a young tad I was involved in the revision of BDRB into DCRB, and I
remember debating all this e-n-d-l-e-s-s-l-y. The current method is a
compromise, acheived through excruciating effort, and like all compromises
necessarily imperfect, granted--but hundreds of thousands of records have
been created using it, and I venture to guess that by now most rare book
cataloguers have a good grasp of the (admittedly complex) rules involved. I
don't want to see this issue revisited every decade for the rest of my
professional life, particularly if the outcome is to be, as I suspect, yet
another compromise that nobody really likes. I am not convinced at this
point that any other proposed transcription method is a) clearer, or b) more
cost/time effective, than the one we already have. 

The question of whether to bring DCRB title transcription more into line
with descriptive bibliography is particularly troubling, and gets to the
heart of what we do. We should keep firmly in mind that our goal is a
workable library finding aid, not a bibliography. As for capitalization: we
could, of course, take advantage of the ambiguity inherent in AACR 1.1B1
("Transcribe ... as to wording, order and spelling, but *not necessarily* as
to punctuation and capitalization.") but that's a slippery slope: why stop
there? Why not add line breaks, etc.? Yikes. 

A certain amount of debate on all this is healthy, and I suppose inevitable,
especially given that many of the principals were not involved in the first
go-round. But for what it's worth, I personally most strongly urge this
group NOT to fiddle radically with the current DCRB transcription convention.

Cheers,

Eric Holzenberg


At 11:33 AM 6/14/99 -0700, you wrote:
>Bob, I have since lost the email version of this, but here is a Word
document that replicates it:
>
> 
>
>--ear
>
>
>
>----------
>From: 	Robert Maxwell[SMTP:robert_maxwell at byu.edu]
>Sent: 	Saturday, June 12, 1999 12:35 PM
>To: 	dcrb-l at lib.byu.edu
>Subject: 	Transcription rules
>
>Elizabeth:
>
>I can't find your summary of the transcription rules discussion. Could you
>send it to me again so I can post it to the DCRB site I am putting together?
>
>Thanks,
>Bob
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>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
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>
>
>Attachment Converted: C:\panix\mime\DCRB transcription.doc
>
************************************************

Eric Holzenberg
Director & Librarian

The Grolier Club
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