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

[Noble, Richard]

Re: "2 unnumbered pages, iv pages, 1 unnumbered page, iv-xvii pages, 3
unnumbered pages, 348, that is, 332 pages, 6 unnumbered pages, 24 pages, 2
unnumbered pages."

It goes a bit beyond "I don't like it", though I'm glad for the moral
support. It's really that people who don't care in the first place will be
confirmed in their intention to pay no attention whatever to such a mess of
verbiage; whereas the people who do care about these sometimes vital details
and want us to communicate them clearly and succinctly will, in their
justified frustration, think of us as perfect fools. Who on earth that deals
with books at all is incapable of understanding "p."? For the love of Mike,
these conventions are a triumph of sorts: simple and elegant tools that took
us a long time to develop.

I've engaged 25 groups of people at Rare Book School, so far, in the art of
describing complex bibliographical phenomena as clearly and simply as
possible, and in this respect RDA is obtuse and altogether retrograde. It's
not simplification--it's patronizing. "The poor dears won't understand
unless we spell it all out". Or is this the best way to make us stop
accounting for this information? It *does* look bad; well then, don't do it
at all.

It may have been true that "one of the principles underlying DCRM [is that]
the rare rules won’t depart from the general rules unless there is a rare
materials reason to do so". We need to revisit just what that principle
really means. Our proper work is dealing with the difficult cases, and we
can't do our work properly with such clumsy tools. In the absence of that
work, dealing with such materials as we do, FRBR will be a perfect sham.

Sorry for the rant. I hadn't realized that despair comes in such small
packages.

RICHARD NOBLE : RARE BOOKS CATALOGER : JOHN HAY LIBRARY : BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912 : 401-863-1187/FAX 863-3384 : RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU


On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Robert Maxwell <robert_maxwell at byu.edu>wrote:

>  Some thoughts on Richard’s thoughts J
>
>
>
> 2 unnumbered pages, iv pages, 1 unnumbered page, iv-xvii pages, 3
> unnumbered pages, 348, that is, 332 pages, 6 unnumbered pages, 24 pages, 2
> unnumbered pages.
>
>
>
> I agree that this RDA result is awful and I don’t like it. However, again,
> there isn’t any rare materials reason why the general rule shouldn’t be
> applied to rare materials, and remember that that is one of the principals
> underlying DCRM (the rare rules won’t depart from the general rules unless
> there is a rare materials reason to do so). “I don’t like it” doesn’t cut it
> as a reason for differing. We will no doubt under our rare rules continue to
> insist that every leaf be counted, which will differ from RDA for rare
> materials reasons, but there is no rare reason that we can insist on
> different *conventions* for counting (e.g. “unnumbered” instead of
> bracketing) the pages we *do* choose to count.
>
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