[DCRM-L] (no subject)

[Deborah J. Leslie]

Three catalogers walk into a bar ...

From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Noble, Richard
Sent: Friday, 11 May 2012 17:20
To: DCRM Revision Group List
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] (no subject)

The question is not whether the facts are important or unimportant, but whether one wishes to introduce a distinction of entities based on them. It is more or less agreed that the basic entity in the taxonomy of books is the issue. I would therefore argue that rules which over-privilege the title page in this way, regardless of its bearing on the identification of one entity as against another, are intellectually suspect, and largely a sop to ignorance, since most library cataloguers are ill-equipped to analyze the situation bibliographically.

That there are are other variants in the preliminaries is of some interest--those too must be noted--but if they are merely evidence that parts of the preliminaries exist in different settings of type which appear to reflect no intention to produce a distinct unit of publication, we should seek ways to unify the description of the actual unit of publication, in part for the sake of being able to account coherently for variations of state. The pragmatics of the situation may vary, of course: OCLC is a crude bibliographical instrument in this respect (though certainly not in others)--I am more often frustrated by the fact that it cannot always reflect different units of publication--e.g. perfectly line-for-line silent reprint editions from originals.

Since, however, in the present case, one could unify the description properly (assuming that we really are talking about a single issue) while ensuring retrieval of all variants via the indexing of those not chosen for the title field, my prejudice is against creating separate records,  which will only end up, down the line, with incorrect holdings anyway.

Somebody please tell a joke ... this is way too serious a tone for me to take on a Friday afternoon (before I go off to torture poor Winston Smith in a stage adaptation of 1984--maybe I could just read this correspondence to him ... )

RICHARD NOBLE : RARE BOOKS CATALOGER : JOHN HAY LIBRARY : BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912 : 401-863-1187/FAX 863-3384 : RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU<mailto:RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU>


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