[DCRM-L] Signature marks that include parentheses

Sun Oct 5 16:55:09 MDT 2014

Richard's response raises for me an interesting general question:  What are "best practices" with respect to bibliographic description, and where does one go to find them articulated?  (The reading list for Richard's Rare Book School course, "Advanced Descriptive Bibliography" - http://www.rarebookschool.org/reading/general/g50/ - provides much of the foundation for formulating those practices, but the works cited are not always in agreement - indeed, some are responses to others - and in any case none provides a useful and reliable distillation.)

A more specific question relates to the role of annotation of the formula in a description, and the meaning of "interpretation" with respect to the formula.  I take it to mean being able to reconstruct (more or less) the actual signing from the formula.  I say "more or less" because some details will hardly ever be recorded, such as whether there is a space between the letter and number in a signature - "A2" vs. "A 2” - or whether the numbers are arabic or roman - “Aij” vs. “A2" (not usually of significance, though occasionally possibly an indication of shared printing, if the practice varies among gatherings in the same book, or as an aid to localization) - and also because, especially in a catalogue record, the formula will often not be constructed with all possible details included (though perhaps that is just an instance of failure to follow best practices).

Difficulties arise when signatures either employ characters not present in fonts available to us (even Unicode doesn't have them all, let alone the "ALA character set" available in OCLC), or use typographic conventions that conflict with the usage of the formula or for which the formula doesn't offer a conventional representation.

For example, two sequences of A B C D, one of which is roman capitals, the other italic capitals, would both be represented (for a book gathered in fours) by A-D^4, and if two of the sequences appeared in the same book, the second would be preceded by a superscript "2" (or perhaps the first by a superscript "pi"), but in order to interpret them - to understand what was actually printed - annotation is required.  The use of parentheses or square brackets around signature marks is not uncommon, either to set apart a new unit or to indicate an interpolation, but square brackets, like italics, have a conventional significance in the standard formula.

An example of an unusual character was recently provided in the Folger blog "The Collation" (http://collation.folger.edu/2014/05/abbreviations-and-signatures/ ) - even those who are familiar with the fairly common (in incunabula, at least) "[con]" and "[rum]" mean might be stumped by "[ter]" without annotation - and there are several different forms that could be rendered as "[et]" or "&" (complicated, for cataloguers, by DCRM(B) G2, which calls for all of them to be transcribed as "&").  And does "[par.]" (or "[paragraph mark]") mean a pilcrow (Unicode 00B6), or a thing that looks like a backwards "D", filled in (sometimes referred to as a capitulum; no Unicode character), or what Unicode calls "curved stem paragraph sign ornament" (Unicode 2761 - some of the font representations of which look very like the "backwards D" character)?

In short, I find annotation often essential to interpretation of the collational formula, not at all an inconvenience.

I share Richard's view of those "silly, multi-syllabic expanded terms".  But it's not clear to me that among those who need to use the fruits of descriptive bibliography and cataloguing, all ambiguous or unusual characters or usages "will be understood by those who need to understand" them, without the aid of annotation.  And even if in the end an uncommon or complicated usage can be figured out, sometimes it makes more sense, in the interest of clarity, to add a verbal component to the symbolic representation.

A tangential thought: It would be very nice if there were a wiki devoted to signatures.  All of us have encountered interesting examples of the way books are signed; Richard Sayce's seminal article on localization based on various practices (many of which relate to signing) is perhaps the most striking example of the use to which the accumulation of such knowledge can be put.  But even just to have a place where examples of odd characters, unusual practices, and the like could be brought together, would I think be useful (as well as fun).  Any of us could create a blog of such things, but it would be much better to have a place where many people could contribute and interact, hosted institutionally, with images having permalinks.  (For any books that are held by the Folger, which would be a pretty large subset of the whole, their recently-announced wiki “Folgerpedia” might be useful: http://collation.folger.edu/2014/07/something-wiki-this-way-comes-or-welcome-to-folgerpedia/ .  But I'm not sure whether this use would fall within their guidelines - though the description of it as an "encyclopedia of all things Folger and of interest to the Folger community" would suggest that it might.)

With apologies for the delay in posting this response - sometimes non-bibliographical life gets in the way …

John Lancaster

On Aug 12, 2014, at 9:16 AM, Noble, Richard <Richard_Noble at brown.edu> wrote:

> I respectfully disagree with Deborah. The result of routine use of placeholders (especially for more than one set of symbols, as could well occur) will result in a formula that is uninterpretable without annotation. The inconvenience of that, to my mind, far outweighs the inconvenience of the occasional odd string, which will be understood by those who need to understand it, and unnecessarily distances us from best practices of descriptive bibliography, not unlike those silly, multi-syllabic expanded terms in RDA.
> 
> RICHARD NOBLE :: RARE MATERIALS CATALOGUER :: JOHN HAY LIBRARY
> BROWN UNIVERSITY  ::  PROVIDENCE, R.I. 02912  ::  401-863-1187
> <Richard_Noble at Brown.edu>
> 
> 
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Deborah J. Leslie <DJLeslie at folger.edu> wrote:
> Thanks, Manon; I agree with John that having a placeholder like "symbol" that has to be defined would be very helpful, and hugely preferable to  ):(4 (-):(4)(however much the added spaces help. (-;)
> 
> Deborah J. Leslie | Folger Shakespeare Library | djleslie at folger.edu | 202.675-0369 | 201 East Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC 20003 | www. folger.edu
> 
> From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of JOHN LANCASTER
> Sent: Saturday, 09 August 2014 18:01
> To: DCRM Users' Group
> Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] Signature marks that include parentheses
> 
> I like the idea of having a generic placeholder, whether “[symbol]” or something else, that always has to be defined in a note.  It would be useful whenever any odd symbol turns up in a collation.
> 
> 
> In many cases, the placeholder+definition would be used for a signature that can’t be reproduced at all; it should be allowable even if the separate pieces might be available in the character set, when it would be difficult, as in this case, to make a clearly readable statement following the normal form of the formula.
> 
> 
> I don’t like using only part of the signature to stand for the whole - that seems more difficult to understand and potentially misleading.
> 
> 
> John Lancaster
> 
> 
> On Aug 9, 2014, at 5:46 PM, Manon Théroux <manon.theroux at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Could you take one of the following approaches?:
> 
> Signatures: [symbol]4-([symbol]4); the symbol is a colon surrounded by inverted parentheses: ):(
> 
> 
> Signatures: :4(-:4); colons enclosed by inverted parentheses.
> 
> 
> Signatures: [colon]4(-[colon]4); colons printed within inverted parentheses: ):(
> 
> 
> Manon
> 
> 
> 
> On Aug 8, 2014, at 3:34 PM, "Young, Stephen" <stephen.young at yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> Eileen Smith, who has served as a lab assistant for Advanced Descriptive Bibliography at Rare Book School,  suggested to me that inserting a space would help to clarify things in these situations. Your example would become:
> 
> ):(4 (-):(4)
> 
> 
> This is what I have been doing lately. The space helps the eyes a little bit.
> 
> 
> Stephen R. Young
> 
> 
> Rare Book Catalog Librarian
> 
> Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
> 
> P.O. Box 208240
> 
> New Haven, CT 06520-8240
> 
> Tel.: 203-432-8385
> 
> Email: stephen.young at yale.edu
> 
> The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library will close for a major renovation in May 2015, reopening in August 2016.  We will maintain a reading room in Sterling Memorial Library during this time, but access to various collections will be limited as early as April 2014 while we prepare for closure. For details, please visit our renovation website.
> 
> 
> 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 08, 2014 3:27 PM
> To: DCRM Users' Group
> Subject: [DCRM-L] Signature marks that include parentheses
> 
> Formatting present: best read in html or RTF
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> Jason LeMay, an alumnus of this year's RBS Rare Book Cataloging course, sent me a query about recording the signature mark ):(  With his permission, I'm reposting it and a version of my response below for discussion.
> 
> I am finally trying to put my Rare Book Cataloging into action. I’ve come across an odd little pamphlet I had previously dealt with, and now I’m preparing to review and enhance my previous cataloging. The entire item is a single gathering of four leaves, and they are signed “):(“, “):(2”, and “):(3” (fourth leaf unsigned).
> 
> For the signature, would I actually record ):(4?
> 
> DJL:
> 
> Jason, yes, you’ve got it right. Since our character set has parentheses and a colon, you can use them to represent the signature mark.
> 
> The difficulty comes when you need to qualify signatures. Parentheses are used to introduce the qualifications, but when the signature mark also has parentheses, the resulting statement can be almost impossible to parse. Let’s imagine that the gathering in your book wasn’t regular and needed to be qualified. Say, that the gathering only has three leaves, you’ve ascertained that the fourth leaf isn’t present, and that your 3-leaf gathering represents a perfect copy.
> 
> Signatures: ):(4(-):(4) A-Z8.
> 
> I’ve resorted to a couple of different ways to ameliorate the situation. One is to use square brackets and an extra space instead of parentheses for qualification. So:
> 
> Signatures: ):(4 [-):(4] A-Z8.
> 
> Which is still enough to make one’s eyes cross.  
> 
> What do you, the community, think about this use of a descriptive phrase in the following signature statement for an actual book.
> 
> Signatures: [inverted parentheses]-3[inverted parentheses]4 4[inverted parentheses]4 (-[inverted parentheses]4) A-C4 D4 (±D1) E4 F4 (±F1) G-3H4 3I4 (-3I4).
> 
> This book is signed with )( instead of ):(, so "inverted parentheses" is accurate. For the latter, one possible remedy I just thought of was to pick a single character to represent the ):( and explain it. Something like  
> 
> Signatures: %-3%4 4%4(-%4) A-C4 D4 (±D1) E4 F4 (±F1) G-3H4 3I4(-3I4); preliminaries are actually signed ):(.
> 
>  Deborah J. Leslie | Folger Shakespeare Library | djleslie at folger.edu | 202.675-0369 | 201 East Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC 20003 | www. folger.edu
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> 

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