For more than a decade, the JSC, the ISSN Network, and IFLA's ISBD Review Group have tried to "harmonize" their rules for what constitutes a major change in a serial title. If you make a proposal for latest entry cataloging to one of the groups, they will say it can't be done because you need approval from the other 2 groups. Successive entry seemed to make a lot of sense when it was introduced some 30 years ago, but some of the reasons had to do with the difficulty of maintaining extensive information on card sets. There are other reasons that have to do with citations in the literature and holdings for libraries that only have partial runs of a serial. I think that latest entry would solve a lot of problems, especially those that are becoming more acute with online journals, but it probably won't happen.
Because of the harmonization agreement, pointing at the ISSN records begs the question. The Atlantic is covered under a special exemption and has a note in the CONSER record (LCCN 93642583) that says "Due to artistic design variations of the cover from issue to issue, the chief source of information for the title proper has been changed to the masthead." The title proper on the record is "The Atlantic monthly" but current issues have "The Atlantic" on the cover. The NSDP at LC, which is the national ISSN center for the U.S., decided to make no more title changes to this title based on "monthly" coming and going. Since ISSN records are contributed by national centers, they will stay in sync with the CONSER record. This applies as of the change that happened in 1993. CONSER and ISSN generally avoid collapsing older records together because that wreaks havoc with ISSN assignments. There are other cases where it would be nice if a frequency word were a minor change, such as when an "Annual report" becomes a "Biennial report" and then just "Report", etc. However, I'm sure there must have been cases where a change or addition of a frequency word indicated a different serial. ------------------------------------------ John Hostage Authorities and Database Integrity Librarian Langdell Hall Harvard Law School Library Cambridge, MA 02138 host...@law.harvard.edu<mailto:host...@law.harvard.edu> +(1)(617) 495-3974 (voice) +(1)(617) 496-4409 (fax) http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/ Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Conference names : use of annual, etc. Only catalogers? The ISSN authority considers them to be different too, changing the title like that gets you a new ISSN. Note the different ISSNs at each point "monthly" and/or "the" was added/removed. The Atlantic 1072-7825 Former titles (until 1993): Atlantic (United States) (0276-9077) (until 1981): Atlantic Monthly (United States) (0004-6795) (until 1971): Atlantic (United States) (0160-6506) (until 1932): Atlantic Monthly (United States) (0160-6514) I am not sure if the suggestion is that NO title change should ever be considered a new resource, or that a judgement be made about when a title change is "significant enough". I don't know if ISSN has ever considered changing their practices, but there is some value in ours being consistent with ISSNs. "Playing with" ISSN is an awfully useful thing. And of course, this is really a debate about "successive entry" vs "latest entry" cataloging of serials, which has been going on for decades. No reason for the debate to stop now (or ever) I guess. But AACR2 made the decision that Mac does not like, many years ago. But one could try to look back at what people argued 30+ years ago that resulted in AACR2 deciding on successive entry cataloging of serials, I am sure there were reasons.
