These corporate body access points for persons holding an office are strange hermaphrodites that are peculiar to the Anglo-American tradition, I think. The idea of using both a corporate heading for the official and a personal name heading for the same person on records for official communications was an anomaly in AACR2, and even more so in RDA. It's not a case of 2 different entities having responsibility for the communication; it's 2 different ways of approaching the same entity. It would be better handled through cross references on the authority records, which are made already, than with redundant access points on the bib records. We could also consider whether these constructed access points for officials make any sense to anyone but catalogers.
------------------------------------------ John Hostage Authorities and Database Integrity Librarian Langdell Hall Harvard Law School Library Cambridge, MA 02138 host...@law.harvard.edu +(1)(617) 495-3974 (voice) +(1)(617) 496-4409 (fax) http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/ -----Original Message----- It doesn't say that anywhere, although you are correct that in the examples we carried over the practice of making an added entry for the person holding the office. Basically, it's a judgment on what entities are responsible for a resource, and I think one could argue that while the government official has chief responsibility for an official communication, the person holding the office also has some kind of responsibility and it would be justified to record an access point for them. But RDA removed the explicit instruction to do so, so it leaves it to catalogers to judge which entities are responsible. If the community feels strongly that there should be an explicit instruction, it could propose a revision to RDA through one of the bodies represented on the Joint Steering Committee. You'll notice also in 19.2.1.3 in the first section of examples "One Person Responsible for the Creation of the Work" that we put an example of something that was not an official communication, where only the access point for the person is recorded: John Paul II, Pope, 1920-2005 Authorized access point representing the creator for: The role of the Christian in the world / Pope John Paul II. Not an official communication
