[DCRM-L] Proposed response on 21.27

[lcreider at lib.nmsu.edu]

Quoting Jackie Dooley <jmdooley at lib.uci.edu>:

> But as a former rare book cataloger (once a cataloger ....) who has
> never encountered one of these critters, as well as a fierce proponent
> of the importance of main entry, a comment from a devil's advocate
> stance that is predicated on 3 assumptions: (1) that we want as few
> "exceptional" rules of entry as possible in our general cataloging
> code, (2) that catalogers are experts in application of principles and
> therefore can live without many "exceptional" rules, and (3) that some
> cataloging decisions are just downright arbitrary:<br>
> <br>

I certainly can't say that I am on the side of the angels, but perhaps as a 
Defender of the Cause I can say a few things. :)  I agree with your first and 
third points but not with the second and not with the application of the first 
and third to this situation.  Special cataloging rules should be as few as 
possible.  They are needed when a) the situation requires a solution that 
differs from the general principles or b) because a reasonably intelligent user 
(patron, administrator, cataloger) could not be expected to reason from the 
general principle to the particular situation.  I don't think that a) applies 
here, but b) does.  The situation is what AACR2 calls shared responsibility or, 
possibly, one of mixed responsibility.  Where John Attig's suggestion that one 
could enter under the first named person falls down is that the roles of the 
individuals _are_ distinguished and that one of them can be reliably considered 
the individual with principal responsibility.  I haven't cataloged as many of 
these things as I would have liked (giving specific subject headings can be a 
real hoot), but I do know that I would have had a much harder time doing the 
cataloging if I had had to reason through the principles each time and 
investigate each publication to see who was primarily responsible.  I've had to 
learn a lot more about early modern academe than I ever wanted to know, and I 
am still not sure that I could have reliably come to a consistent conclusion on 
the work identity of one of these things without the rule.  Is this rule 
necessary?  Its existence has certainly saved me time and money, much as the 
rule about libretti has saved me again and again.


> One of the principal functions of the main entry is to establish a
> standard citation for an item, and at some level, ANY main entry can
> accomplish that. In various situations, for example, AACR explicitly
> directs catalogers to select what is in effect an arbitrary choice
> among equals (one example would be the case of 3 authors listed on the
> t.p. in alphabetical order, so Bates wins over Smith). Academic
> disputations are a bit different, since, as you've explained, there
> truly is one player who has played the primary authorial role. But
> given that the student will also have an entry (or vice versa in the
> nonstandard cases), what harm would be done if the lesser author
> sometimes inappropriately received the main entry? 21.27 indeed says to
> choose the praeses "... unless the authorship of the respondent,
> defender, etc., can be established," implying that the cataloger is
> going to examine the piece anyway, and that evidence may well exist
> that reinforces the final choice of entry.

I think this line of reasoning mixes apples and aardvarks. If you want to be 
able to consistently identify a work, you need some principles on which to make 
the decision.  Even choices based on non-logical principles such as first-named 
or alphabetical order are better than saying that any choice is ok or that it 
doesn't matter if someone receives the wrong entry.  The cataloger will have to 
examine the piece for subject cataloging but not necessarily for evidence on 
authorship unless some feature of the wording of the title raises a question.  
An analogous situation arises when cataloging a play whose title says it is a 
translation of another work but has changed the structure (four acts instead of 
three) and names of the characters.  

Rules about access, particularly choice about how to identify a work should be 
kept out of DCRM.  It is to our interest to fit in with the broader community 
so that our records can live in the same catalog.  Most of the rules about 
title access in DCRB and the DCRM(B) draft are simply applications of various 
LCRIs and common sense, and cataloging the same title using AACR2 would often 
require the same added entries.

Larry Creider