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

[John Attig]

On 8/25/2010 7:07 PM, Robert Maxwell wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Deborah J. Leslie
> Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 6:12 PM
> To: DCRM Revision Group List
> Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record
>
> 3. The RDA 300 is going to pose nightmarish problems for volumes of even
> the least complexity. Would there be a rare book reason to depart from
> RDA and continue the use of square brackets for unnumbered pages/leaves?
>
> As I opined in my previous post, nightmarish or not, in my opinion there is no rare book reason to depart from a descriptive *convention*. There would be a rare reason to depart from RDA in the matter of exactly what pages/leaves we do count.
>
> I would be interested in hearing from John Attig on this matter as well-why did RDA decide to change the convention for recording unnumbered and misleading pages?
Why did RDA make this change?

There are two answers to this, both of which pointed in the same direction.

(a) Use of brackets (or any other convention that might be used to 
signal interpolations) in RDA is strictly based on the sources of 
information defined for the element.  The source of information for 
Extent is "evidence presented by the resource itself (or on any 
accompanying material or container)" and may even be taken from "any 
source" if desired.  You only use brackets if you are taking information 
from a source other than the source defined; in this case, all the 
information to be included in the Extent statement comes comes from the 
resource itself, and there is therefore no justification for ever using 
brackets.

This simple RDA rule for the use of brackets conflicts with the 
conventions that catalogers are familiar with.  The Extent statement is 
not the only such case.  Catalogers of cartographic materials were 
shocked to learn that they could no longer follow the conventions by 
which they distinguished Scale statements that were given on the 
resource from those that the cataloger calculated based on verbal or 
graphic scales.  RDA is trying to simplify presentation of information 
in a bibliographic description and to minimize the use of possibly 
non-intuitive conventions such as abbreviations, symbols, and 
punctuation marks.

I would note that, when the suggestion was first made to ban brackets 
from the Extent statement and to use "unnumbered" instead, I realized 
that this would not scale to a very complicated extent statement.  I 
seem to recall looking through the Examples to Accompany DCRB looking 
for something I could use as a "reductio ad absurdum" example; I'm not 
sure that I found anything sufficiently ghastly, but whatever was 
included in the ALA response, it was apparently not convincing.

(b) The other principle that led us to this change was that of user 
convenience.  We were convinced that our users did not share our 
understanding of many of the conventions that we used in our 
descriptions, such as the significance of brackets, and the use of 
abbreviations.  These convictions are reflected throughout RDA's various 
instructions relating to transcribing and recording information.

User convenience is not a particularly simple concept, but it is clear 
that the users the JSC had in mind were NOT scholars who are familiar 
with the rules and conventions of descriptive bibliography.  We can 
argue about whether the RDA instructions benefit even general users, but 
I think it would be more fruitful to recognize that bibliographic 
descriptions of rare materials are intended for a more specialized user 
community made up of scholars and students who need detailed information 
about rare materials and who have learned a set of conventions for 
recording and interpreting this detailed information.

In this sense, I think I disagree with Bob's statement that there is no 
rare book reason to depart from a descriptive convention.  We are 
working within a scholarly community of users who do understand certain 
descriptive conventions and who would actually find our current Extent 
statements easier to interpret than the proposed RDA conventions.  It 
seems to me that this is a sufficient justification for us to consider 
developing alternative instructions (which will miraculously turn out to 
look much like the current DCRM(B) rules!) for recording the extent of 
rare materials.

This is one of several issues that I am hoping to put into a discussion 
paper on issues and strategies for adjusting DCRM to be based on RDA.  
My intention is to have this available for discussion at the BSC meeting 
at Midwinter.

     John