[DCRM-L] Academic disputations

[Rettberg, Dan]

A decade ago when I was employed at another institution I had the privilege of cataloging a large number (hundreds) of academic disputations from the 16th-18th centuries. At that time I added what seemed to be the standardly used fields of 502 and 655 (Academic dissertation) to the records. Recently, here at HUC, I did another stack of same. AACR2 never was very specific about cataloging these, and DCRM(B) doesn't seem to add much. It has occurred to me that as genre terms go, "Academic dissertation" does not seem the most appropriate term for these. It makes me think of a modern dissertation which clearly is something quite different from these early disputations. Researchers interested in these early disputations as a group would clearly not be interested in having to search a long list of modern dissertations to find them. Am I missing something obvious? Does anyone have a suggestion of a better way to isolate such records for easy retrieval?
 
Thanks.
 
Dan Rettberg
Rare Book and Manuscript Bibliographer
Klau Library
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Cincinnati, Ohio
 
drettberg at huc.edu 
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