According to AACR2, square brackets appearing in a title were to be
replaced by round brackets (1.1B1.). RAK has a similar rule, covering
all transcribed elements.
I think this practice made sense, as the square brackets are used by
catalogers in a special way, especially to mark an unusual source of
information. Therefore, replacing square brackets by "ordinary" ones
avoids confusion between two very different things.
Now in RDA I cannot find an equivalent rule for square brackets in
transcribed elements. Perhaps this is due to the fact that square
brackets are no longer the only way to indicate that information was
taken from outside the resource (2.2.4). On the other hand, using square
brackets is still a possible way to do it, and the LC-PCC PS says to do
it that way. Also, there are other instructions where the use of square
brackets is explicitly prescribed (1.7.5 symbols; 2.4.1.5 statements
naming more than three persons, etc., optional omission; 2.3.4.5
Supplyingother title information for cartographic resources; 2.3.4.6
Supplyingother title information for moving image resources).
If I haven't overlooked the rule, it seems that square brackets
appearing in the source of information are to be transcribed as such,
according to 1.7.3 (unless an agency makes use of the first alternative
and 1.7.1 to decree otherwise). I wonder if this was really intended by
the JSC, or whether perhaps there was some oversight?
Heidrun
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Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Faculty of Information and Communication
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
