[DCRM-L] Editorial conventions WAS RE: RBMS PS review Q4: Extent of text

Tue Apr 17 17:37:54 MDT 2018

I agree with you, Deborah, but the RDA ship has sailed, so issue isn’t why i.e. and brackets and sic should be fine and that people actually do understand the conventions. The issue—at least if we’re going to continue to operate under the basic principle we all agreed on when we first started revising DCRB—is whether there is a good rare materials reason to depart from the current general rules (RDA) on any of these points.

Bob

Robert L. Maxwell
Ancient Languages and Special Collections Librarian
6728 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801)422-5568

From: DCRM-L <dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu> On Behalf Of Deborah J. Leslie
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 5:28 PM
To: DCRM Users' Group <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
Subject: [DCRM-L] Editorial conventions WAS RE: RBMS PS review Q4: Extent of text

Coming late to this discussion …

It is a complete mystery to me why RDA decided to depart so radically from standard editorial conventions. The argument that "users don't understand …" has no legs when the use of square brackets, [sic], i.e., e.g., and ellipses are standard editorial conventions in wide and constant use. Open just about any recent style manual to confirm.

Examples of quoted text in the Washington Post of the last few days (exact copy-and-paste)—no comments, please, on the incendiary nature of some of the quotes:

“Somehow, I read and misconstrued both the Rockefeller and Rothchild [sic] theories,”
“Rothschilds contro[l] the climate
“[I]t isn’t clear the Trump administration
the percentage of women receiving timely prenatal care (i.e., 70.8 percent)
disproportionate number of red states (e.g., Montana, North Dakota, Indiana)
and the searing lesson … of the Iraq War

Deborah J. Leslie | Folger Shakespeare Library | djleslie at folger.edu<mailto:djleslie at folger.edu> |

From: DCRM-L [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of Kathie Coblentz
Sent: Tuesday, 03 April, 2018 12:48
To: dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] RBMS PS review Q4: Extent of text

I completely agree with Bob Maxwell on "i.e.," and I have no problems using "that is" instead. (It never ceases to surprise me how many educated people use "i.e." when they mean "e.g.," and vice versa. Or "the other way around," I suppose I should say.)

However, "sic" is awfully hard to replace with an English word or concise phrase. Of course RDA gospel calls for omitting it altogether in transcribing "an element as it appears on the source," and I can go along with that, as long as there is a note (and/or other title entry) "correcting the inaccuracy," though in the case of rare materials, I would not limit that to "if considered important for identification or access."

But in quoted material from other sources, there is no other good way to call attention to typos, factual errors or other unexpected variations in the data.

This doesn't really apply to the discussion of Extent of text, since I can't imagine using "sic" there for any reason, but it might be worth reflecting on for the rest of the catalog record.

Oh, and for what it's worth: for rare materials, I'm completely on board with using the square brackets convention instead of "unnumbered," for the sake of everyone's sanity. I wish RDA would drop "unnumbered" altogether. Anyone who cares about the distinction between pages with page numbers on them and pages with no page numbers on them, understands the bracketing convention. As for the rest, how many noncatalogers even know what "unnumbered pages" means?

--------------------------------------------------------
Kathie Coblentz | The New York Public Library
Rare Materials Cataloger

Special Collections/Special Formats Processing
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 5th Avenue, Room 313, New York, NY 10018
kathiecoblentz at nypl.org<mailto:kathiecoblentz at nypl.org>

My opinions, not NYPL's

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Maxwell <robert_maxwell at byu.edu<mailto:robert_maxwell at byu.edu>>
To: "DCRM Users' Group" <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>>
Cc:
Bcc:
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2018 16:05:50 +0000
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] RBMS PS review Q4: Extent of text
I can just about accept the argument that there is a rare reason for departing from RDA extent instructions in the matter of bracketing vs. “unnumbered”—rare book extent statements are much more likely than other types of extent statements to need to record unnumbered sequences.

However, I do not accept the argument that rare extent statements should continue to use “i.e.” and “sic” when the rest of RDA practice does not. In the first place, if 0.4.3.7 justified this it would have justified it for RDA as a whole—the rare materials community is not the only one that “commonly used” these forms, all communities commonly used these forms before RDA came along and this was not thought to be a good reason to refuse to go along with the new instruction. So that argument simply won’t wash, for me at least. There is no compelling rare materials reason in those cases why the rare rules should depart from the general RDA rules.

Bob

Robert L. Maxwell
Ancient Languages and Special Collections Librarian
6728 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801)422-5568<tel:(801)%20422-5568>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20180417/dd63bb38/attachment-0001.html>