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

[Bryan, Anna]

Has anyone asked the users of our records how they find the bracketing and abbreviations?  Have any studies been done?  Are our scholarly users of say, my generation (i.e. fifties and later) comfortable with them because we grew up on catalog cards, where compression was crucial, while those in their 20s find them cryptic and not useful?

As for the complaint of more keying, I use macros and templates for repetitive keying.  Setting up a macro for "unnumbered pages" and "pages" is not very onerous.

But I am curious:  have rare book catalogers actually *asked* patrons of various generations what works best for them?  I'm not cataloging for other catalogers.  I'm cataloging for patrons, myself.

Anna Bryan
Sr. Cataloger
Library of Congress

I speak only for myself (obviously). 

-----Original Message-----
From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Maxwell
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 3:42 PM
To: DCRM Revision Group List
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record

-----Original Message-----
From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of John Attig
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 1:07 PM
To: DCRM Revision Group List
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record

John says:  

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.

Bob say:

This may be true in the context of a very few catalogs such as the Folger's. This is not true in the context of most catalogs nowadays. DCRMB records coexist with general records and we can't assume that only the scholarly community of users will encounter and use our records.


Robert L. Maxwell
Head, Special Collections and Formats Catalog Dept.
6728 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801)422-5568