[DCRB-L] DCRM Area 0

[Hillyard, Brian]

I have been keeping various CERL persons (whom I had consulted befoire the
Yale Conference) up to date with the latest proposed revised texts, and I'm
copying to this list (for further discussion) a comment from one of them,
Tony Curwen, plus comments I sent to him in response.

Brian 

********************************************************
Dr Brian Hillyard
Head of Rare Books, National Library of Scotland
George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1EW
b.hillyard at nls.uk: 0131-226 4531 (voice): 0131-466 2807 (fax)
*********************************************************
Dear Brian

Thank you for including me in this exchange.  I've been following the
discussions in EXLIBRIS with
interest.

Did anything come of the suggestion that capitals without diacritics
should be transcribed as lower-case with diacritics according to the
practice of the bulk of the text?

While I was looking up the reference you gave us I stumbled upon the
new paragraph d) inserted in 0C2 :

    0C2.
    If the publication has more than one title page, choose one as the 
    basis of the description according to the following guidelines, 
    applying the first applicable criterion:
    a) ...	
    b) ...	
    c) ...		
    d) If the publication is in one volume and has been issued in a
       publisher's binding or printed wrapper, choose the cover as the 
       chief source if it contains more recent data than that provided 
       on the title page. 

0C2 says it deals with publications with more than one title page.  
Does the situation described in d) qualify?  Have I missed something?
Is a binding or wrapper defined as a title page somewhere?

Very best regards

Tony Curwen
 *******************************
Dear Tony

Thanks for sending this.

0C2(d) is with an eye to post-1800 publications, as you will have realised.
Looking at old DCRB 0C2, I agree with you that all the scenarios set out
there do involve more than one title page as one would normally use the term
"title page",  and that a publisher's binding does not fall within this
description.  I also note that if the publication is in more than one
volume, it would still be relevant to take account of the publisher's
binding.  I can see arguments for revising the content of the new (d) and
for locating it elsewhere (e.g. as a new 0C3, shunting the present 0C3 to
0C4).

I do remember a posting about applying diacritics -- following the practice
of the bulk of the text -- to lower-case when transcribed from upper-case,
and I don't think there has been more about this.  I note that old 0H "In
general do not add accents and other diacritical marks that are not present
in the source" has been retained as new 0F2, which is at variance with
ISBD(A) 0.8 "In converting capitals to lower case, the usage (including that
of diacritics) in the publication being described should be followed."
There is a certain attraction in this -- in not treating diacritics any
differently (they are, after all, part of the word) -- but there may be a
feeling (this was certainly felt by my foreign-language colleagues many
years ago at NLS when we first considered this) that
(1) finding the relevant lower-case practice might be slow because unless
you find the same word, how do you KNOW that it is the RELEVANT practice
(2) faced with upper-case text, knowing in the first place WHEN you need to
find a lower-case equivalent is itself problematic
In other words, you would need to have a good grasp of (say) 17th-century
French to implement this rule (and I remember being told that practice was
very inconsistent), and I suspect that in practice in many (nearly all?)
libraries -- at least when cataloguing books in languages "foreign" to them
-- this would be difficult to implement.

Best wishes

Brian