[DCRM-L] statement of extent for artist's book

[Margaret F. Nichols]

I'm not an expert on artists' books, but I can think of a couple of possible issues with cataloging one of them as a 3-dimensional form in keeping with RDA 3.4.6.2, instead of as a book. One is that if people think of it as an artist's *book*, they'll probably be looking for it as a book. Another is that if the item you're cataloging is treated as realia and most other artists' books are treated as books, a patron doing a search for all the artists' books in the library will likely limit the search to books, and your item will get overlooked. I'm sure there are artists' books that seem more like sculptures than like books, though, and an art museum might well catalog them as sculptures, while a library would consider them to be books. Being a rare book librarian, cataloging items for a rare book collection, I would treat them as books, as long as they are focused on printed text and they meet the RDA definition of a monograph ("A resource that is complete in one part or intended to be completed within a finite number of parts").

Two cents, and good luck wishes,

Margaret Nichols


_______________________________

Margaret F. Nichols
Rare Materials Cataloging Coordinator
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections
2B Kroch Library
Cornell University 
Ithaca, NY 14853-5302
Tel. (607) 255-9667 



-----Original Message-----
From: DCRM-L [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of silvanan at mptek.net
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 3:21 PM
To: DCRM-L <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
Subject: [DCRM-L] statement of extent for artist's book

Hello there,
One of my tasks at work is to catalog artist's books and even though some fall outside of the conventional description for a codex-style book (i.e pages, volume, etc.), we still use the books record format for them. Using RDA rule 3.4.6.2 as a basis,  I was considering adopting "1 artist's book" as a general statement of extant, with details given in a
500 note, for titles that are not book shaped. However, I don't see this much in practice and treatment of artist's books seems to vary by institution. I guess my question is, does anyone see a potential issue with this approach, and what would you recommend if you do?

-Silvana 


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