[DCRM-L] Publishers Personal Name/Corporate Body

[Ted P Gemberling]

Deborah,
I thought the Bibliographic Standards Committee principles you sent us (“Guidelines for Establishing Certain Names Associated with Printers”) made a lot of sense. If you follow them, you will be reflecting the historical reality of printers/publishers quite well, I think.

As to the principles Richard talked about below, I believe the first one, which favors a corporate name if a printer wasn’t completely consistent during a defined period, seems generally sound. The one kind of exception I can think of is where a corporate name represents a partnership (usually with several surnames and/or given names included), and there seem to be instances where not all members of the partnership worked on all books. I wonder if in that sort of case, it would make more sense to use the personal name(s). I wouldn’t think that if you had a partnership with individuals A, B, and C, and one book was only printed by A and B, you’d want to set up another corporate name for just those two partners. Now, if you saw a pattern of them working together and apart from him on quite a few books, maybe it would make sense.

I’ve worked pretty hard over the years to reflect publishers correctly, but I doubt I’ve been 100% consistent on the personal/corporate distinction. I’m sure there were times when I used a corporate name rather than a personal one because it seemed more convenient. I probably haven’t been as careful with 19th century as I was with earlier books.

The only thing I would say is that it would be a serious error to make all printers/publishers corporate bodies, especially before the 19th century. But then, it could be some libraries have a policy of not spending a lot of time setting up printer names. Maybe they feel it’s adequate if the user has keyword access, and if the corporate name contains the surname of the central individual, that’s good enough. However, I’d rather they’d follow that principle in their local catalog rather than OCLC master records.

I’ll get to looking at your examples more next week.

Ted Gemberling

From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Deborah J. Leslie
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2016 4:23 PM
To: DCRM Users' Group
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] Publishers Personal Name/Corporate Body

Richard, I agree with you. I wrote these out more in the manner of a hypothesis, with the intent of testing them against the real world. I started with the test case of Richard Bentley, who started in a partnership with Colburn, then published under his own name, then added his son to the business name some time later. At some point I think there was a brother involved. I quickly realized that the imprints, especially in his early days (the 2nd quarter of the 19th century) revealed fluidity of relationships and functions, and the simultaneous individual and corporate presentation isn't helpful or appropriate.

Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S. | Senior Cataloger, Folger Shakespeare Library | djleslie at folger.edu<mailto:djleslie at folger.edu> | 202.675-0369 | 201 East Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC 20003 | www. folger.edu | orcid.org/0000-0001-5848-5467


From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu> [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Noble, Richard
Sent: Thursday, 26 May 2016 14:42
To: DCRM Users' Group
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] Publishers Personal Name/Corporate Body


On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Deborah J. Leslie <DJLeslie at folger.edu<mailto: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<mailto:RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU>own.edu<http://own.edu>>
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