Bernhard said:
>While not taking issue with the importance of ISBD as such, it
>can, I think, not be called a "common core" of cataloging codes
>in general, but of those of their parts relating to description.
It is true that ISBD does not address access points. ISBD does
provide for the transcription of information which in turn "justifies"
access points. One of the great weaknesses of RDA (IMNSHO) is the
breaking of the link between description and access points; in RDA one
may transcribe and not "trace", and/or "trace" a name not justified by
transcription.
>The latter [display] can and must be left to software ...
So long as librarians familiar with bibliographic display dating back
to Panizzi are responsible, and not IT people with no expertise in
that area. Unlabeled ISBD display is certainly the easiest for me to
understand. A criminal defendant, composer, translator, illustrator,
editor, etc. with the label "Author" really irritates me.
"Contributor" or "Personal name" isn't very helpful either.
>This, of course and among other things, speaks for standardized
>codes and acronyms rather than vernacular verbiage.
If you mean substitution of "language of the catalogue" phrases for
standardized ISBD Latin abbreviation inclusions, I could not agree
with you more. I hope you will urge EURIG to stick with ISBD
inclusions, not to mention adopting ISBD's Area 0 "electronic" as
media type.
>The focus in cataloging must be on access points and their
>standardization and international harmonization by way of vehicles
like VIAF.
Yes.
>Another focus should be on the question of *what* we catalog, and
>here in particular, how to treat parts of larger entities.
We found the UKMARC 248 to be an excellent solution, giving direct
title access to constituent parts as opposed to the difficult to index
505$t and 700$t. Too bad UK cataloguers did not stick to their guns
and get that added to MARC21. German cataloguers did a better job of
getting favourite things added, but did not address constituent parts.
Something like UKMARC 248 should be a part of the new coding schema,
assuming it ever actually happens.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
