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

[JOHN LANCASTER]

Information from Christine Straitt at ESTC:

In the late 1990s, she was told that they were inserted for tracking purposes by the BL.  There were similar ones from EEBO, encountered while she was working on the Huntington Wing team from 10/1997 through 5/1999.  They were mostly in unedited UMI records.  The team was supposed to verify those items on the films belonging to the Huntington, edit those records comparing the filmed copy to the copy in hand, and then remove the “Dummy …” note, but to ignore the note in any other records.

They don’t now seem to serve any purpose. The notes don’t survive in the current ESTC data base; only in local OPACs, apparently in records downloaded from ESTC/RLIN long ago.

I hope this helps.

John


> On Nov 27, 2018, at 5:37 PM, Erin Blake <erin.blake.folger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20181128/0800192c/attachment.html>