[DCRM-L] Reconsidering digraphs

[Hillyard, Brian]

As somebody who served on (even moderated) the relevant Working Group (WG 2) at the DCRM Revision Conference, Yale, in March 2003, my memory is that our concern was exclusively with the exceptions (French, Scandinavian, etc.) which we did agonise over; I don't remember that we seriously questioned the separation of the ae and oe ligatures in (e.g.) Latin.   I've read some of the other postings on this, and I cannot see that this is a question of content as opposed to form.  I suspect the ESTC thinking was influenced by the possibility that transcribing ae and oe ligatures as such in records for (e.g.) editions of Caesar's works would sometimes help distinguish between editions.  One could point out that to the same end it would be useful to transcribe long S (lowercase) as a different character -- I don't think any descriptive cataloguing rules have tried to prescribe this, but because ae and oe ligatures had traditionally been retained in the printing trade, it seemed acceptable and possible to retain those in transcription (when I began cataloguing in 1977, typewriters used by NLS cataloguers had these ligatures).  It does seem to me to be an arbitrary line we're drawing here and not a distinction between content and form.  Where some modern languages do now use ligatures, there may be a case for using those ligatures, but as we don't use ae and oe ligatures now in printing Latin, there may be a case for not using them -- even though we could.  In the vocabulary of DCRM(B) principles, are these cases of how we balance representation and standardization?

 

Here in NLS I remember we did transcribe ae and oe ligatures when we began MARC cataloguing  and I also remember the problems of OPAC display (e.g. instances of "Casar", I think) and retrieval that caused us to revise the practice.

 
This is an entirely personal view: no consultation at all.
 
Brian
 

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

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