Adam and Kevin,
Thanks for the examples. Now I understand much better what this is all
about.
Perhaps a comparison with the German rules is of interest here. The
older German cataloging code, the "Prussian instructions" (1899/1908),
had elaborate rules for collective titles. But with the development of
the RAK rules in the 1970s, these were much reduced. RAK only knows one
single collective title ("[Sammlung]", i.e. "[Collection]"); so there is
no "works", "novels" etc., and no "selections".
The RAK rule for the collective title isn't much in use nowadays. I
think that most people feel (wrongly, I suppose) that it was only
relevant in the age of card catalogs. But anyway, here's what the rule says:
Make an added name-title entry ("Name of author: [Collection]" or "Name
of author: [Collection] <Language>]") under the following conditions:
- if only the titles of the individual works are on the source of
information (there is no title for the whole)
- if the title of the collection is of a generic type, e.g. "Collected
works", "Schiller's plays", "Letters from the years ...", "Selected
philosophical writings" a.s.o.
I think this comes close to Kevin's idea of when a collective title
should be used.
Editions of poems or books of photographs or some such of one person do
not fall under this rule. They are not treated as collections, but as
single works. This makes a lot of sense to me: When a poet publishes a
book of poems under a specific title, he or she will probably think of
this as *one* work.
Now back to RDA. After some more thinking, I wonder whether the problem
might be that we're mixing up two quite different things: The question
of what is the title of the work with a need for collocating certain
types of publication.
As it stands, RDA seems to fall short in two ways:
1. As Kevin has already pointed out, it is quite odd not to use a
distinct title (perhaps even one chosen by the author) as the title of
the work. Also, the decision which cases fall under the first sentence
of 6.2.2.10 must be very difficult, so I'm not surprised that the
application is somewhat arbitrary.
2. The collocation mechanism doesn't work as well as it should, because
the cases treated unter the first sentence of 6.2.2.10 would not come up
under the collective title.
Could we perhaps solve these problems by clearly distinguishing between
the title of the work on the one hand and the mechanism for collocation
on the other? If you think about it, something like "Short stories.
Selections" isn't *really* a title of the work. It is rather a
description, telling us it is a collection and giving information about
the genre and the degree of completeness. These are certainly attributes
of the work, but it's not the title. In RDA, they should be placed
somewhere else, probably in chapter 7, and they should be recorded in
every case, quite regardless of whether the title is distinct or generic.
The reason for "disguising" information about genre etc. as the title of
the work may be that this is one of the few work elements which are
recorded in the composite description - and therefore can be used for
collocation. If we had records for every work, and these were linked
with the manifestations, we could record information like "collection",
genre and completeness as separate elements in the work record. Then a
user could search the records for the works for the combination of a
certain author, "collection" and e.g. "short stories", and also ask for
all manifestations linked with these work records.
I remember that ALA mentions the aspect of genre as a desideratum in
their excellent discussion paper on the treatment of subjects:
http://www.rda-jsc.org/working2.html#6ala-discussion2.
This was welcomed in the German response:
http://www.rda-jsc.org/docs/6JSC-ALA-Discussion-2-DNB-response.pdf
Heidrun
On 07.10.2013 17:41, Kevin M Randall wrote:
Heidrun Wiesenmüller wrote:
So, I wonder: What is the function of the first sentence in 6.2.2.10? Should it
be seen as the basic rule or rather as an exception for rare cases?
I do think that the expectation behind RDA 6.2.2.10 is that most compilations published in modern times will
be entered under the title appearing on the resource. The guidelines in .1-.3 are for those instances in
which there is no collective title (like the Barnes and Noble editions of classic works that have only the
author's name and the titles of the individual works included), or perhaps has only the creator's name in a
"title position" on the resource, or just the creator's name and a generic title like
"Novels", "Stories", etc.
The increasingly common practice of applying the conventional collective title even to things that have their
own title is, in my opinion, just bizarre. Not only that, it is quite inconsistent; for instance, it is
applied *much* more often to poetry collections than it is to short story collections. Why don't we see
books of Stephen King's short stories cataloged with a 240 "Short stories. Selections"? Why isn't
the book of Shirley Jackson stories "Just an ordinary day" cataloged with a 240 "Short
stories. Selections"?
What I would very much like to see is some kind of logical reasoning behind the
idea that because something is a collection, not a single work, we must assume
that library users don't know the collection by the title that the author and
publisher gave to it--the title that is printed right there on the title page,
the cover, the spine, etc., and that appears in publisher catalogs,
advertisements, book reviews, bestseller lists, etc.
Kevin M. Randall
Principal Serials Cataloger
Northwestern University Library
k...@northwestern.edu
(847) 491-2939
Proudly wearing the sensible shoes since 1978!
--
---------------------
Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
