J. McRee (Mac) Elrod wrote: > Accurate transcription of the title as on the item, even if titles as > found on containers are substituted for DVDs and CD-ROMs, seems to me > to remain the basis of patron helpful cataloguing. Variant forms of > the title as found in CIP or publisher produced metadata are helpful > (in MARC terms) as 246s, but not 245s. > > Your humble member of the cult of the title page,
And I guess I'll play my normal role of the wild, anarcho-syndicalist. ;-) Cutter and his comrades were dealing with other technologies and assumed that a particular resource would not change. Therefore, a title page was forever, just as the extent, the place of publication and so on. That is as true today as it was then. But with virtual resources (I hesitate even to use the term "electronic resources") all of this must be reconsidered. Even in printed materials, the weird publications (loose-leaf) didn't fit into the classical norms all that well, since updates could change a publication completely. Everything previous was thrown into the transfer box more or less randomly for the user to figure out. With online materials, the older versions often completely disappear (unfortunately) and the record made so carefully by transcribing the title page may end up describing nothing at all. This does not mean that we should reconsider cataloging printed materials--our rules work very well as they are now--but the problem arises when we try to insist that the same rules must operate in the virtual world. They don't make sense. This is why I feel it would be more productive to leave the tried-and-true methods alone and simply consider virtual materials to be fundamentally different--which is true. We do this now with manuscripts in many ways, where the rule of transcription of the "title" of a draft of a speech or letter that was dashed off in a couple of seconds and full of typos is not necessarily transcribed exactly. How should virtual materials be handled? That is a huge question whose answers must evolve with time, but does it mean that we should reconsider the tried and true methods of describing physical materials because of some theoretical belief that all materials must be handled in the same ways? To me, it doesn't make sense that it is so important to transcribe faithfully the chief source of information for a title of a virtual resource when it may change in a week or within the next 5 minutes. It doesn't serve the purpose of the cataloger or the user and can lead only to confusion for all. What is the solution? Again, that can come only with trial and error. I have some ideas of my own but I admit they may not work. But still, I do not see how these considerations should change how we transcribe the title of a book or serial. Jim Weinheimer
