[DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record

[Lenore Rouse]

Congratulations to Bob and BYU on their ground-breaking efforts (and 
many thanks to Bob for clearing up MY ignorance of how to access IRs in 
OCLC.)


I agree with Erin that /sic/ is still useful following an error in the 
source. On the other hand when [sic] appears in a 16^th century Latin 
record which has gobs of other bracketed info the user may wonder if it 
was part of the title, so perhaps in such cases its use might be 
explained in a note unless the nature of the error is immediately obvius 
[sic].

For the same reason it seems to me preferable to continue to expand 
abbreviations and bracket the resulting interpolations. I would not want 
to see abbreviations expanded without bracketing since there would then 
be no way of knowing whether the printer had spelled the word out or 
abbreviated in the original. For me there is no greater felicity than 
opening an OCLC record that EXACTLY mirrors what I have in hand; the 
Bowers hobbyhorse of making the distant object visible will be there 
until all our title pages are freely available digitally.

The idea of transcribing the horizontal bar along with the ampersand is 
an interesting one but in practice it might be problematic when the bar 
is often used across SEVERAL letters, for instance /pp/ with one line 
over both letters means /propter/. Our “typographical facilities” at 
least in OCLC will only render it as 2 bars, one over each letter which 
might be misleading and certainly looks odd. There are many examples of 
this (although no unambiguous ones in DCRMB that I can see) - /DNO/ with 
a line over all three letters = /domino/. It actually might be quicker 
to expand the word than to try to insert the line over each character, 
and it’s often been hard for me to decide whether to interpret the line 
as a macron or a tilde depending on the “typographical facilities” 
available to the printer. Of course I have in desperation transcribed 
the line when I wasn’t really sure what it stood for and I agree that it 
should never be silently omitted. I would like to hear from the 
manuscript community on this since they probably have the largest dog in 
this fight.

It’s more work I suppose but the spelled out forms of relator terms are 
much more user-friendly. Folio, octavo - in this day it's best to spell 
them out too. I hope there is an easy way of reprogramming all the NACO 
/fl/.s to /active/, but /16th cent./ never did look good.

Hope to see more records like this. They're a big help in making RDA 
seem more viable.

Lenore

-- 
Lenore M. Rouse
Curator, Rare Books & Special Collections
Adjunct Professor, School of Library and Information Science
The Catholic University of America
Room 214, Mullen Library
620 Michigan Avenue N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20064

PHONE: 202 319-5090
E-MAIL: rouse at cua.edu