[DCRM-L] OCLC -- Rare Materials Demarcation Date

[Lapka, Francis]

I am forwarding the following message on behalf of Jay Weitz, OCLC, who is keen to hear input from our community.

Francis

--

These questions are related to our work on the merge guidelines for rare materials, but have come up here at OCLC within a different context.  Running this past you, and the rest of the Bibliographic Standards Committee if you’d like, seemed a prudent idea.

As many of you know, since the beginning of OCLC’s automated Duplicate Detection and Resolution (DDR) process, bibliographic records “pre-1801” have been exempted from DDR processing.  This was deemed to be in line with how many, if not most, descriptive conventions tended to define rare materials, early printed monographs, and the like (AACR2 2.12 “pre-nineteenth-century publications;” DCRB 0A “published before 1801;” DCRM(B) I.2 “Unlike its predecessors, which were intended to apply exclusively to pre-1801 imprints …;” as examples).

Over the life of both versions of DDR, that “pre-1801” limit has been interpreted in various ways.  We are taking this opportunity to see what the RBMS community would prefer.

If the 1800 demarcation date continues to make sense to the community, what would be preferable?  If the year 1800 itself is included in the exemption, many ambiguous dates in MARC that imply post-1800 dates (“18—", “181-“, “between 1800 and 1815”, and so on) also get exempted from DDR.  With that in mind, is it better to designate the limit as “up to and including 1799” or “up to and including 1800”?

Or would there be a better, more specific, or more justifiable cut-off date than 1800, possibly corresponding to some historic development in printing?

Remember that the more DDR exemptions there are, the more duplicate records WorldCat will contain and the more merges will need to be done manually.

Thanks so much for considering these questions.

jay
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20200130/5dfcfbf6/attachment.html>