[DCRM-L] Publishers Personal Name/Corporate Body

[Noble, Richard]

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Deborah J. Leslie <DJLeslie at folger.edu>
wrote:

> *Simultaneous individual and corporate presentation*
>
> If an entity presents itself inconsistently as both an individual and a
> corporation within a more-or-less defined time period, establish and trace
> the corporate name.
>
>
>
> *Consecutive individual and corporate (or corporate and individual)
> presentation*
>
> If an entity presents itself consistently within a more-or-less defined
> time period as an individual, and subsequently presents itself as a
> corporation, or vice versa, establish and trace as personal and corporate
> names, respectively.
>
>
>
​The second of these seems clear enough, but the first is very problematic.
In practice--and the c19 practices regarding imprints could be very
inconsistent--the simplest implementation would result from following the
imprint as presented in the manifestation in hand as to its representing a
corporate or personal publisher. Establishing that an inconsistency occurs
within a specifiable time period amounts to proving a positive negative:
that within a time period (itself requiring comprehensive research to
establish) the usage is *not* consistent.

​There are already rats' nests of headings that confuse the issue, because
catalogers have only so much time to do that comprehensive research beyond
the item in hand *and* meld the heading into a ball of records. There's
already enough ​work to be done to tease a preferred corporate name out of
the variants that a publisher may present, and determine that they all
represent the same entity; but the best case scenario is that one should be
able to do that for a publisher who also presents as a personal name, and
make 500/510 links between the ARs to provide comprehensive, consistent,
and easily identified AAPs.

Bear in mid also that the database we mostly use is full of records based
on the principle of condensing the 260 $b to the minimal form adequate for
identification--which make researching exact form of imprints a practical
impossibility: the only "usage" we see in these records is the *cataloger's*
 usage.

(The whole business of establishing predominant name "usage" of every kind
via NUC/OCLC has been my least favorite thing in 33 years of cataloging. We
should write a song with the refrain "These are a few of my least favorite
things".)

RICHARD NOBLE :: RARE MATERIALS CATALOGUER :: JOHN HAY LIBRARY
BROWN UNIVERSITY  ::  PROVIDENCE, R.I. 02912  ::  401-863-1187
<Richard_Noble at Br <RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU>own.edu>
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