[DCRM-L] "Dummy..." at start of notes in old ESTC records?

[Erin Blake]

The label "Dummy" follows immediately after the 500$a in many older ESTC
records (including a bunch of legacy records in our OPAC, imported from
RLIN in the olden days), and the next word always begins with a capital
letter, so it's evidently a label of some sort.

Does anyone know why "Dummy" was used this way?

If you do a Google search on the phrase "Dummy reproduction of the original
in" you can find a slew of them (including in EEBO-TCP bibliographic
descriptions, but not EEBO, so the records have been cleaned up).

Background: a researcher asked what "Dummy" means in a library context, and
I was about to explain shelf dummies (place-holders on the shelf for a book
semi-permanently shelved somewhere else) and dummies in the sense of model
books (salesmen's dummies, publisher's dummies, etc.). Then I looked at the
context, and that's clearly not what's going on here.

Thanks!

Erin.



----------------
Erin Blake, Ph.D.  |  Senior Cataloger  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |
201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu  |
office tel. +1 202-675-0323  |  www.folger.edu
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