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

[Whittaker, Beth M]

At the risk of sounding like a penny-pinching administrator, I would
argue that the situation Deborah outlines below is one that NO amount of
standardized MARC cataloging can easily explain. There will ALWAYS be
oddities in printed books that require direct questions beyond what it
is the catalog record, no matter how complex. 

 

Might catalogers' time be better spent creating records which do not
*lie* about what is in the book, but do not attempt to explain every
possible detail? A follow up question from a researcher, perhaps
requesting additional clarification or to have something scanned, might
take less time, even if it happens every few years, than hours of
agonizing over how to represent the document, how to abbreviate it, how
to pay for the education to know how to abbreviate it, etc.

 

Of course, in an ideal world, our records could link to some of this
additional information much more easily. In my lifetime, I hope!

 

Beth

 

From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On
Behalf Of Deborah J. Leslie
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 11:01 AM
To: DCRM Revision Group List
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record

 

Richard's reply is well worth reading. I think Henry Raine's points,
too, deserve more prominence. The more needlessly complex certain
actions are--in this case, turning away from a compact and relatively
easily parse-able statement about how many leaves a book has and what
that book says about how many leaves it has, towards something with lots
of verbiage that makes it harder to create and harder to read-the more
we open ourselves to mistakes and the greater necessity for additional
proofreading, all simultaneous with shrinking staffs, as Brian Hillyard
has pointed out. 

 

I know not every place is like the Folger, but I sometimes receive
specific questions about minute details on our cataloging records. [Here
is an excerpt from one awaiting my attention: In one of the copies of
the 1589 edition that the Folger holds there are two versions of Jerome
Bowes' account of his embassy to Russia, with similar pagination (pp.
491-496 and pp. 491-501). The first seems to have been pasted in,
whereas the second looks like its part of the print run for this
edition. The first is the original account of Bowes himself, the other
is an anonymous third person account of his embassy.] 

 

Richard is asking the right questions. Why do we own rare materials? Who
is using them? For what? Are they finding what they need? If so, how? If
not, why not? It is only within the context of these questions and the
answers to them that we, the rare materials cataloging community, can
intelligently approach our response to RDA, and how much of its lead we
will follow as the base cataloging source from which our rules are
drawn.

_________________________ 
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 <http://www.folger.edu/>  

 

 

 

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