This brings up the question of mapping from RDA to ISBD, which is at present the only presentation scheme explicitly identified in RDA (and the only one recognized by the draft Statement of International Cataloguing Principles).
ISBD, including the draft 2006 Consolidated ISBD, defines the title proper as including the alternative title (Consolidated ISBD 1.1.1). It provides no mechanism (such as the symbolic labels known as "prescribed punctuation") for separately recording the alternative title. This will create an ISBD presentation problem if the connector is not explicitly recorded somewhere in the encoded RDA record (such as in Dan Matei's <or> element or in an as-yet undefined MARC 21 subfield). As Dan points out, any encoding will also have to deal with complex constructs such as alternative parallel titles. Of course, this can also be handled as John suggests below, with strict transcription restricted to rare materials where such transcription may be crucial for purposes of identification. But to maintain compatibility with ISBD, such a change would need to be accompanied by a similar change in ISBD, making the alternative title (without connector) a separate ISBD element, with its own symbolic label. Ed Jones National University (San Diego, Calif.) -----Original Message----- From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Attig Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2007 11:09 AM To: RDA-L@INFOSERV.NLC-BNC.CA Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Alternate titles, an example of description broken into bits 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
