[DCRM-L] 8vo: another mass update gone awry?

[Robert Steele]

I apologize for posting to multiple lists.

I have been noticing non-DCRM(B) records in OCLC with a bibliographic
format field (340  ǂm 8vo. ǂ2 rdabf). For anyone not familiar with it, the
rdabf tag refers to the RDA Bibliographic Format registry  (rdabf:
https://www.rdaregistry.info/termList/bookFormat/)

Unfortunately, in many cases these are books from the machine-made era.
Here is an example from 1863: OCLC 14985739. The definition of 8vo in the
Registry is, as it should be: "A bibliographic format consisting of one or
more leaves that are 1/8 of the whole sheet," and of course, the size of
the original sheet is very difficult to ascertain in a book produced in
1863 on machine-made paper.

The records I have found so far are lacking a 300 $$c subfield. They also
were originally entered into OCLC decades ago, but were recently updated.
My guess is somebody decided to strip 8vo from the end of 300 and move it
to an rda field. Unfortunately, they failed to consider that many older
records used 8vo as a general indicator of size, and not as "Bibliographic
Format" as defined in the registry, so we end up with records with missing
and erroneous information.

I'll be fixing this one soon, but I wonder how many there are.

Bob Steele
Cataloging Librarian
Jacob Burns Law Library
George Washington University
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