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

[Allison Rich]

Hello All:

I have been reading and absorbing all the RDA discussions about the 300 
field.

Aside from Echoing Deborah Leslie's and John Attig's statements about 
the ungainliness what the 300 field would like
in an RDA record from the prospective of the rare books cataloguer, I 
have several other observations to list.

1) In an age of shrinking staffs and budgets, this will create A**more 
work** for a cataloguer who is already time-pressed to create
full level DCRB records which are useful and meaningful for a 
researcher. The additional work is needless, when it can
be stated so much more succinctly. I can tell you it will create 
immeasurable more work for me, when I am now the only rare books
cataloguer remaining on staff. The JCB is dedicated to inputting the 
best and most complete records possible for its holdings and I will
continue to uphold that tradition, otherwise I would never have chosen 
to do what I do. At a library like the JCB who has such a large
backlog of material and now only one person to do it, well, you can 
image it makes me extremely discouraged ....

2) The square brackets around unnumbered pages and leaves is an elegant 
data-style convention that becomes ungainly when
converted into the user friendly mode of spelling it all out. It's 
succinct, and doesn't require many additional brain cells to
absorb a data construct.

I am not afraid of change, but what I do have a difficult time trying to 
comprehend is, at least in the case of the 300 field, is how
user-friendly becomes actually dumb-downed. In this day and age when so 
few libraries bother to put full level DCRB records into
OCLC either in a master record or an institutional record, there will 
indeed be many more non-scholars consulting and using our
records. However, should we not give them some credit to understand a 
simple data construct such as the square bracket?

That's just my two sous,
~Allison


> The statement of extent in DCRM(B) contains two kinds of information:
> what the resource says about itself (the pagination or foliation), and
> what is true about the resource (the accounting of every leaf in a
> book). I can see making the argument that the accounting for
> unpaginated/unfoliated leaves that are not inferred to be part of a
> sequence is in fact supplied by the cataloger and comes from outside the
> resource.
>
> And I must say, how can this statement:  
>
> "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."
>
> *possibly* be easier to understand than the current practice by
> *anybody*, even if they don't quite know what the brackets mean in
> statements of extent?
> _________________________ 
> Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S. 
> RBMS past chair 2010-2011 | Head of Cataloging, Folger Shakespeare
> Library 
> 201 East Capitol St., S.E. | Washington, D.C. 20003 | 202.675-0369 
> djleslie at folger.edu | http://www.folger.edu 
>   
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"Outside of a dog, 
a book is probably man's best friend,
and inside of a dog, 
it's too dark to read. 
- Groucho Marx"

Allison Rich
Catalogue Librarian
John Carter Brown Library
Providence, Rhode Island
Allison_Rich at brown.edu

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