Quoting John Attig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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.
Besides, practice (which I think is enshrined somewhere in the LCRIs -- maybe for UTs of pre-1501 works?) enjoins cataloguers to drop an alternative title from the title proper when formulating a UT -- a rule much honoured in the breach, I may say; which reminds me of my view which I've stated elsewhere, that a rule which is habitually disregarded is probably a bad rule, or at least badly formulated). I doubt an workable algorithm could be devised for this, anyway. "Eric, or Little by little" seems clear enough. But in the LC catalog I find: This or that [sound recording] / Sway & King Tech. The title proper is "This or that". And in some languages there isn't even a single word: in early Christian writings, there are title + alternative title formulations using "vel" for "or", but others using "seu", and even IIRC a few with no conjunction explicit -- Latin can do that!
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).
If the structure that's been assumed doesn't accomodate what we've decided we need to do, then something has to be changed -- structure or rule.
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).
And if we don't have the whole title and statement of responsibility area transcribed, two routine functions will be irreparably compromised: Control of duplicate records in aggregated databases (such as OCLC or Libraries Australia) -- which matters for efficient copycataloguing, but also for efficient management of ILL/document delivery business; and reliable matching between document in hand (or on screen, etc.) and a bibliographic record -- or data set, if records are passi -- will become quite impossible, and it will be impossible for students, researchers, copyeditors and writers to verify citations in footnotes and reference lists. "The highest principle for the construction of cataloguing codes should be the convenience of the users of the catalogue."--IFLA IME-ICC Principles, latest state http://www.nl.go.kr/icc/down/070412_2.pdf That is to say, we are not justified in expecting users to suffer because it's convenient to adopt structures and rules which don't support what they reasonably require. And library staff are users too. Hal Cain Dalton McCaughey Library Parkville, Victoria, Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
