[DCRM-L] RE: DCRM(B) nonroman signatures

[Deborah J. Leslie]

Horrors!!!

The nonroman signatures are correct in the hard copy, but not in
Cataloger's Desktop. 

Bruce, this is a Big Deal. They need to be fixed. Plus, I would be
interested to know how it happened, not for the purpose of blame but for
possible prevention strategies.

Thanks,
Deborah
______________________________________________________
Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S.
Chair, RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee
Head of Cataloging, Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003
djleslie at folger.edu  |  202.675-0369  |  http://www.folger.edu



-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Ross [mailto:jross at nd.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, 07 June, 2007 11:50
To: Deborah J. Leslie
Subject: DCRM(B) nonroman signatures


Hi Deborah,

Please look at DCRM(b) 7B9.8-9.11.  I do not yet have the hard copy of 
this, but in the online version available through Catalogers Desktop, 
there are a number of problems.  The sentence below the chart of 
characters in 7B9.9 gives the signatures in roman characters, not Greek,

and then the second statement which should be the romanized version has 
the phrase "(in Greek characters)" and gives the same list of characters

a-g, A-2L. Obviously, this looks redundant because the first statement 
is not in the vernacular script.   In the comment section,  everything 
is given in romanized form.  If I remember correctly, we were giving 
this in Greek script or characters, but the most distressing part is 
that the description of the full alphabet has the phrase "A-W", not 
alpha to omega [in Greek script].  This was not there in the latest 
version I looked at.  I remember there were font issues in the display 
but the right unicode values were there for the characters.  As there is

no "w" in the romanized form of the Greek alphabet in the chart, this is

very confusing.

The same problem comes up in the description of signatures in Hebrew 
alphabet (7B9.10). The signature statement below the chart of characters

is in romanized form, not the vernacular script.  Instead of aleph to 
shin, it reads "a-w".  Where is this "w" coming from?  Did an editor at 
the printing press transcribe omega and shin as "w"?  The romanized 
signature statement uses the character for aleph and sh, which is 
correct, but what happened to the vernacular script signatures?  Again, 
"w" is not in the list of letters used to romanize the Greek alphabet, 
so the reader and cataloger is confused.

The Church Slavic signature statement at least came out ok. 

Did these signature statements come out correctly in the hard copy but 
not in the online version?  I don't see how this could be a font problem

in individual browsers.  Someone changed the unicode values in our text 
and created this confusion.  A spellchecker? 

Thanks for looking into this.

Regards,

Joe