As a visually impaired user, I can report that text in ALL CAPS is considerably more difficult to read than text in lower or mixed case. I could go into the reasons for this, but as Hal Cain states, it's more or less generally understood to be true.
As to whether it is faithful to change case when transcribing, I have to ask just how faithful we are in our transcription if we don't use the same font as the chief source of information. I think we would probably all agree that matching fonts is clearly impossible (and insane anyway). So, our transcriptions is, in even the best of circumstances, not an exact rendition (link to .jpg for that). In that case, shouldn't we make our data easy to read by using lower or mixed case. On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 1:00 AM, <hec...@dml.vic.edu.au> wrote: > Quoting "J. McRee Elrod" <m...@slc.bc.ca>: > > Capitalization as found would be acceptable in 505 contents and 520 >> summaries, but 245 titles are seen in hitlists with other titles, so >> uniformity is more important. >> >> In the upper case examples I checked, the all caps do not reflect the >> source, according to Amazon images. There is no rationalization apart >> from bone laziness in harvesting data. >> > > Contents notes rendered all uppercase have attracted hostile comment > already (perhaps not here, but certainly on Autocat), when incorporated into > (AACR2) LC records from linked data produced or captured elsewhere. It's > widely understood that continuous uppercase text is more difficult for most > people to read. > > I fail to understand what reasonable purpose can be served in using > uppercase. If it's as a paltry attempt to represent the style of the > titlepage (or other source of primary identifying data for a document), that > purpose would be better served by attaching a link to a titlepage image -- > which is a strategy I'm considering for a forthcoming project with early > printed books. > > In fact, all lowercase would be better for legibility, and just as simple > to do. > > Hal Cain > Melbourne, Australia > hec...@dml.vic.edu.au > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. > -- Adger Williams Colgate University Library 315-228-7310 awilli...@colgate.edu
