[DCRB-L] Main entry for collectors

[Richard Noble]

Mere lucubrations:

Beth is dead right about the rationale for collector main entry in APPM; 
but collections of published materials, as opposed to archival materials, 
fall into a kind of grey area, largely because there's a tension between 
our notions of main entry for individual published items, or items 
published in some sense collectively, as against main entry for archival 
collections.

If I recall, the examples in CSB are entered under title--but these are not 
the sort of collections addressed in APPM. The LC guidelines were devised 
for the purpose of creating collective records for bodies of materials for 
which item-level cataloging was judged to be uneconomical (something to do 
with clearing arrearages...). The "collections" thus created within the 
catalog and on the shelves are in themselves of no interest as such.

Main entry is not dead. To conceptualize it, ask yourself what the entry 
point should be for a single-entry book catalogue, and by extension, what 
the order should be for the elements of reference citations. Take, for 
example, the case of the Roosenwald Collection at LC, for which there is a 
corporate heading "Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress)". 
 From the point of view of this discussion, LC finesses the problem by 
aving only an authority record for the collection itself. As an "adequate" 
verbal formula it's entered directly; there's also a 410 "Library of 
Congress. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection", which suggests the direction 
one might go in if searching for an alternate main entry.

The question is, what do you think people might look for in that one-entry 
list? Where in my list of references at the back of my book would I want to 
list the collection as a resource? Where does the identity of the 
collection begin? Well, really, with Lessing J. Rosenwald, or course; but 
if I were looking for a collection, as a catalogue-naive but otherwise 
intelligent user (something that's hard for most of us to imagine, I 
suspect), I think I might begin with the institution in which the 
collection resides, if not with Rosenwald himself. Sadly, searching on 
Rosenwald's name as author/creator will not retrieve the individual items 
or the authority record in the LC database--which does suggest that a 
collection-level record, with whatever main entry, might be a useful 
addition to the LC catalogue, and to OCLC and RLIN too.

I'd have to infer, if a 710 heading is taken as a kind of reference 
citation, that LC would enter the collection under title, with a 700 for 
Rosenwald (please--and not just a 600). Frankly, I'm not sure that the 
choice is ever going to get beyond arbitrariness. Also, I wonder how 
necessary it is to be absolutely prescriptive about all this: these will 
never be shared records, though of course it's always more convenient when 
people enter similar things similarly in large databases.

At Brown we've been using the citation form as 110 main entry. This was my 
idea, 12 years ago, and I now think it may have been rather silly. There 
seemed to be a logic to "advancing" a heading that is otherwise a mere 
added entry, when the record represents the collection itself, but it 
really has no functional advantage unless one could narrow a search to main 
entries. (Is there any catalogue that includes that option??)

I suppose I've mentioned Brown's documentation for set-collection records, 
but here's the URL again:

http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library/Catalog/setrecords.html

I'd hope that whatever the Committee comes up with will not cast us down 
too deep into the netherworld of heterodoxy (though I guess I'm agnostic 
about main entry for these things).

At 1/22/04 01:22 PM -0500, Beth Russell wrote, among other sensible things:
> From a purely theoretical point of view, the "collector" is in fact, the 
> CREATOR of the collection, which is the ITEM being cataloged. There is 
> only one item being cataloged in a collection-level record (the 
> collection) and if one individual is responsible for assembling its 
> contents in its current state, this activity surely merits main entry, so 
> long as we maintain the concept of main entry in our cataloging rules.



RICHARD NOBLE : RARE BOOK CATALOGUER : JOHN HAY LIBRARY : BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912 : 401-863-1187/FAX 863-2093 : RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU 
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