IFLA principle 2.2. states: "Common usage. Vocabulary used in descriptions and access should be in accord with that of the majority of users." My question remains: how do we know what vocabulary the "majority of users" expect to find in a catalog? Have any empirical studies been done on the question? Is there even such a thing as "the majority of users" given the diversity of users and user-tasks that are carried out in library catalogs? (These are not merely rhetorical questions... if someone has worked on this, I'd love to see what they discovered.)
Some AACR2-isms, like "[s.l.]", seem pretty clearly to be outside of the norm for an English-speaking person who is not a cataloger or a pedant (but perhaps I repeat myself, here ;)). But others, like "circa" or "flourished" seem less clear-cut. (They both show up in Webster's, for example.) And when we start replacing "circa" with "approximately" and "flourished 1532-1593" with "approximately 1532-approximately 1593", aren't we encroaching on IFLA's principle 2.7, "Economy"? I understand that, at some point in the post-MARCian future, most of these terms will be replaced with URIs, so a library (or even an individual library user) will able to "tune" its display according to local preference. But, we aren't there yet, and seems uncertain to me when we'll arrive. And when we do there will be a lot of unconverted data to deal with so it seems like it's still worth discussing the "literals", as it were. Benjamin Abrahamse Cataloging Coordinator Acquisitions, Metadata and Enterprise Systems MIT Libraries 617-253-7137
