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

[Deborah J. Leslie]

For Jay's first question, "up to and including 1800" is the traditional standard, on the principle exemplified by those of us who celebrated the beginning of the 21st century on January 1, 2001. (-;

For the other, many institutions use a later cut-off date in an attempt to more closely approximate a division between hand-and machine-press processes. The Folger uses 1830: I am responsible for cataloging pre-1831 printed material using DCRM(B), while a colleague is responsible for post-1830 printed material using RDA.


Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S. | Folger Shakespeare Library | 201 East Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC 20003 | 202.675-0369 | djleslie at folger.edu | www.folger.edu
________________________________
From: DCRM-L [dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] on behalf of Lapka, Francis [francis.lapka at yale.edu]
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2020 09:53
To: 'dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu'
Subject: [DCRM-L] OCLC -- Rare Materials Demarcation Date

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