>Really? There is a part 2 to AACR2? I never got that far into the book! ;-)
>In my opinion, laziness has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Catalogers were >always supposed to check to see if there were other editions of the work and >relate those editions using a >uniform title when appropriate. If it is not >appropriate, such as when there is only a single edition, they can stop and go >on to the next item. But they haven't "stopped." The choice of main entry (just choosing the main author responsible) is still part of the choice for identifying the work. The uniform title choice (or lack of a decision about it) doesn't change the fact that a work exists in a manifestation, and it doesn't change the other decisions that revolve around that fact. There is still a specific choice being made about authorship for the main intellectual or creative content. Even if no other editions exist, it still might be ambiguous as what the work in an item actually is, and who is primarily responsible for it. AACR2 (and mostly copied in RDA) has may situations when catalogers are called upon to tease out the relationships among entities that exist in an item, as well as to do things in a consistent way that is cognizant of relationships between entities in resources in a collection. In other words, works don't just suddenly appear when a cataloger makes a decision about a uniform title. The entities, and the data specific to those entities, will always exist. This fact is always made evident whenever works become subjects of other works, or works are found to be part of a series (the series being a work in its own right), or when works are adapted into other works. When one adds subject headings to a record, one generally says it's the "work" that has the subject heading. There are a huge number of relationships that can exist in bibliographic records, and there are myriad conventions for indicating those relationships, with an overreliance on free text descriptions of relationships (i.e., which cannot be easily turned into facets or adapted to easy navigation). It's not just about a narrow set of circumstances of editions of a work with different titles. Thomas Brenndorfer Guelph Public Library
