Thursday, June 7, 2007
According to C.A.Cutter (4th ed, 1904, p.12) the first two objects of a
catalog are:
1. To enable a person to find a book of which either (A) the author, (B) the
title [or] (C) the subject is known.
2. To show what the library has (D) by a given author, (E) on a given
subject [or] (F) in a given kind of literature.
The first is known as the finding function, the second as the colocation
function.
I believe (C), (E) and (F) are outside the scope of descriptive cataloging
and its rules.
Much has been written about to limitations of romanization by Spalding,
Wellisch and Weinberg among others. Basically it's user-unfriendly and contrary
to the principle of access equity because it forces those seeking nonroman
script library resources to make the extra and inefficient first step of
determing how access to what they want is romanized--expressed in a writing
system
other than the one they want. It seems to me that this subordinates the first
function which would be better met by vernacular access points to the second
function. Note that the second function arises when a library has multiple
works by an author or multiple edition of one work.
I hope RDA can resolve this.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) )
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