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

[HRaine at nyhistory.org]

In addition to looking absurd, long and unintelligible statements of extent such as the example cited below can result in catalogers introducing inaccuracies or confusion in the catalog record.  That can also happen with the use of square brackets, for sure, but I can see how easy it would be for a cataloger to leave off the "un" from "unnumbered," for example.
 
 
Henry Raine
Head of Library Technical Services
The New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024

Voice: (212) 485-9257 ~ Fax: (212) 875-1591 ~ Email: HRaine at nyhistory.org



-----dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu wrote: -----


To: "DCRM Revision Group List" <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
From: "Deborah J. Leslie" <DJLeslie at FOLGER.edu>
Sent by: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu
Date: 08/26/2010 09:48AM
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record


I tend to agree with Richard that the statement of extent horror in RDA goes well beyond not liking it. It is nearly unintelligible. Perhaps the rare book reason might be that we are committed to a more thorough statement of the physical artifact as the artifact expresses itself. 
 
Much more than spelling out "p.", it's the lack of square brackets that makes the statement nearly impossible to parse.     
 
From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Noble, Richard
Sent: Wednesday, 25 August, 2010 23:57
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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