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

[Karen Attar]

On the whole I am shy of contributing to the DCRM(B) list because I am
afraid of being shouted down - but I would like to support everything
said in the email below.

 

Heroes of bibliography trailblazed to get the shortest form that was
clear and internationally understandable (another way of phrasing the
end of Richard's first paragraph). The rare book cataloguing community -
and also, incidentally, the antiquarian bookselling community and the
academic community - show through having adopted these conventions the
belief that they achieved it. Why destroy it?

 

I'd go beyond everybody understanding 'p.', and like to ask how people
come to rare books. If they've done a Master's course in an academic
subject - which I suggest is a typical British way in - they'll have
learned standard abbreviations for formats.

 

Re the mass of verbiage: rare book catalogue records are likely to
contain a lot of words anyway through a preponderance of general and
copy-specific notes which add research value and sometimes essential
information. If there are extra unnecessary words in the descriptive
area of the record, will the reader reach the notes - or will his eye
glaze over?

 

Also: rare books, especially of the hand-press period, are an
international, not a national  heritage. Certainly in my library I have
far more early printed books published in languages other than England
and countries outside the British Isles than I do STC/Wing items. Of
course we have notes in our own language, that's inevitable, and the
advanced nature of Anglo-American catalogues makes English a default
language anyway. But spelling out "unnumbered leaves" etc reduces
internationality by having a language element which isn't necessary.

 

Re uniformity: by becoming uniform with RDA by spelling everything out
we in fact lose uniformity with ESTC and with printed bibliographies.

 

Perhaps we need to think about our users, and why we do what we do. What
would the leading lights of the Bibliographical Society of America think
of the proposed spellings out?

 

Karen

 

Dr Karen Attar

Rare Books Librarian

Senate House Library, University of London

Senate House

Malet St

London

WC1E 7HU

Tel. 020 7862 8472

 

The University of London is an exempt charity in England and Wales and a
charity registered in Scotland (reg. no. SC041194)

 

From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On
Behalf Of Noble, Richard
Sent: 26 August 2010 04:57
To: DCRM Revision Group List
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record

 

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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