Karen, I think you have misunderstood the topic of conversation.
An alternative title does actually use the word OR or its linguistic
equivalent to connect parts of the title. For example, the title of
Shakespeare's play in the earliest editions (and many modern ones) is
"Twelfth night, or What you will"; the title of Voltaire's story is
"Candide, ou L'optimisme". According to provisions of the ISBD, AACR
and (until recently) RDA, that entire string is the title proper.
Since few people actually are aware of these facts, it seemed strange
to include the alternative title (the part following the "or") in the
title proper. Hence the decision.
The fact that there is no place in RDA for the "or" is (it seems to
me) an example of the same effort that results in the 246 field doing
double duty as both transcription of what appears on the source and
the access point for the variant title. RDA also makes no
distinction between the use of a data element for recording
information from the source and for providing access. I suspect that
the answer to this particular problem is that the actual
transcription of the source (the entire source, I would think) will
end up in an annotation, when that actual transcription is needed (as
it is for rare materials).
And Martha is right -- if the "or" is to be part of the display
supplied from the encoding of the data elements, then we will need to
record the language of each element (or at least of any elements that
are not accurately reflected in the record-level language coding).
John Attig
[not writing as:]
ALA Representative to the JSC
