Everyone: The book in question was cataloged by University of Chicago, an American cataloging agency, presumably therefore supposed to be using American spellings for things. The book itself was in Swedish, so would not have said anywhere specifically that it had "all beautiful colo(u)red illustrations". I do not correct British spellings when I see records by UKM etc., or generally, for that matter. I changed it here only because I was also editing out the phrase "all beautiful", so thought I'd clean up both at the same time.
IMNSHO not all the illustrations were beautiful. And frankly, this is the problem that I had with the record--not really whether illustrations were listed as colored or not (I tend to note this especially in art books, as others have mentioned). The problem is that subjective judgements have been allowed into cataloging, where I don't believe they should exist. Since this is an RDA record, and I am not entirely conversant with RDA rules, I sent this around to the wider cataloging public, to see if this is acceptable practice under the RDA framework. (After I had a good laugh, and then fixed the 300.) Since Mr. Cronin of University of Chicago has replied to RDA-L about the question of whether this is RDA practice, I'll consider it answered: "My personal apologies to the cataloging community for what was put in the 300 field. This has nothing to do with RDA, nor does it reflect CGU's policy or philosophy. While NYPL would like to politicize it, this is nothing more than a demonstration of extremely poor judgment of a cataloger who, frankly, should have known better." I will only state, for the record, that I was not attempting to "politicize" the issue, but rather to get a handle on the new rule-set for cataloging, and discover how far my understanding of what goes into a cataloging record has to change. I'm glad to know that subjectivity is not standard RDA practice. I will admit to calling CGU out publicly for their cataloging in this instance, but I would also do it for an AACR2 cataloging agency that had made strange errors in records, if I knew with certainty which agency had done the cataloging (i.e., it's about the cataloging, and nothing more). Thanks to everyone for responses and opinions. It's been interesting reading! Deborah Tomaras, NACO Coordinator Librarian II Western European Languages Team New York Public Library Library Services Center 31-11 Thomson Ave. Long Island City, N.Y. 11101 (917) 229-9561 dtoma...@nypl.org Disclaimer: Alas, my ideas are merely my own, and not indicative of New York Public Library policy.
