[DCRM-L] Incunabula - Coding the year of printing

[Noble, Richard]

How have those of you who regularly catalog incunabula dealt with the
situation addresses in the following passages from
http://istc.bl.uk/help.html ?

The analogous situation in the place and period I started out with, Britain
c18, was that of legal year dates between 1 January and Lady Day (25
March): transcribed year recorded in the data as Gregorian year--e.g.
1724/5 = 1725. But for this earlier period would q dates be appropriate in
MARC ff, reflecting the residual doubt in these cases--e.g. Venice 25
January 1483/84 would be treated as "1483 or 1484"?

This does affect searching in the WorldCat, which is frustrating enough as
it is for a temporary incunabulist.

ISTC Help:

"In printing towns where the year-number commonly changed on a day other
than 1 January, such as Venice (1 March), Florence (25 March), and Paris
(Easter), year dates from the early part of the year are often expressed in
such forms as 1491/92, 1499/1500. Occasionally a printer can be shown to
have used both styles of dating, common or local, indifferently, and
decision is accordingly uncertain unless documentary or physical evidence
(from types or woodcuts) is available. On rare occasions the date as
printed is impossible in any system."\

"Because of the variety of expressions of date of printing (e.g., "[14]78",
"not before Aug. 1479", "between Apr. 1484 and 1486", "15 Feb. 1499/1500",
"after 1500"), ISTC uses a separate field for the standardized year of
printing. The dates just quoted are standardized as 1478, 1479, 1484-86,
1500, and 1501. These year-codes are not displayed but are drawn upon in
searches involving date-ranging and sorting. They also enable rough
statistical work to be undertaken, though owing to the large quantity of
undated and not closely datable incunabula, the results of such enquiries
are always likely to be in varying degrees imprecise. Undated books where
there is not enough evidence to hand even to estimate a date are said to be
"undated", and these are not coded for date-ranging purposes."

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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