[DCRM-L] Date of Production and Date of Manufacture elements - should a priority order be provided to prefer data in the resource itself first?

[Dooley,Jackie]

Bravo, Bob! I'll go further and say kill brackets everywhere!

In a closely related context, I admit having been astonished upon reading through DCRM(G) to see that brackets are mandated for all titles of "groups" (aka collections), despite the fact that DCRM(G) *always* requires a note about the source of any title. DACS, on the other hand, eschews brackets entirely. Lots of archival graphics are cataloged using DACS. The records generally live in the same catalogs, as Bob mentions. I'd say that bracketing supplied titles in DCRM(G) is pretty much pointless.

And why-she opined, even more crankily--are we still obsessing about this kind of detail when the morphing state of "bibliographic" description demands that we attend to much much much bigger issues? Catalogers understand the meaning of brackets, as (presumably) do scholars working with printed books of the handpress era. Who else does? Isn't a prominent note saying where the title came from far more universally comprehensible? And the farther down into the description one goes, IMHO the lesser the importance of such distinctions. Cataloging is being done by many people who aren't trained in library methods these days. Over time we'll be using linked data to connect library records to lots of those. Ergo: distinctions such as brackets have become less and less meaningful.

I confess that as I've become older and farther distanced from my days of having fairly major cataloging cred (e.g., ahem, as one of the co-editors of DCRB [progeny of BDRB and antecedent to DCRM, for the youthful among us]), I've become more crotchety about the minutiae of cataloging despite getting less crotchety about many other things in life. :) Many aspects of catalog records as mandated by our various rules are incredibly important!! Especially when they help people discover where the stuff is. But far from all.

Happy new year to all!! -Jackie

PS I do still wear my cataloging medals with pride and honor. :)

--
Jackie Dooley
Program Officer, OCLC Research
Past President (2012-2013)
Society of American Archivists


From: Bob Maxwell <robert_maxwell at byu.edu<mailto:robert_maxwell at byu.edu>>
Reply-To: DCRM-L <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>>
Date: Tuesday, 31December, 2013 10:04 AM
To: DCRM-L <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>>
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] Date of Production and Date of Manufacture elements - should a priority order be provided to prefer data in the resource itself first?

I still maintain that, since we're for the most part in mixed catalogs (that is, neither exclusively dcrmb, or dacs, or rda, to say nothing of a mixture of different conventions and codes over time), and given the subjectivity of whether or not the bracketing convention is followed (is it the sort of resource that where a date would normally be found or not?), the presence or absence or brackets will be completely meaningless to end users (even catalogers), so what is the purpose of the convention (specifically, with regard to the date of production element)? To ask the Lubetzky question, why is this rule necessary?

Bob

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

"We should set an example for all the world, rather than confine ourselves to the course which has been heretofore pursued"--Eliza R. Snow, 1842.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20131231/d110029b/attachment.html>