Bernhard said:
28.10.2013 09:11, Heidrun Wiesenmüller:
RAK has a rule which is similar (yet not identical) to RDA's idea of
corporate bodies which are "responsible for originating, issuing, or
causing to be issued". The definition in RAK is: "a corporate body which
has either prepared *or* initiated and edited an anonymous work". So,
there is a precondition here (unknown to the Anglo-American world) that
there is no personal author.
Such a corporate body is called the "Urheber" (a possible translation
might be "originator"). If this corporate body is named in the title
proper,...
... or if the name would need to be added to the title proper in order
to individualize the title [in the case of a generic title] ...
Quite. I was simplying matters here a bit.
... it gets main entry (with an added entry under the title proper).
If it's not named in the title proper, main entry will be under the
title proper, and the corporate body gets an added entry.
I must say that I find this a beautifully simple rule (unfortunately,
quite incompatible with RDA).
Its "beauty" is that it is a purely *formalistic* rule that does not
require
cataloger's judgement of the content.
This is a very valid assessment. Indeed, the German RAK rules have a
decided preference for formal criteria. I think there is an implicit
ideal here: That, using the rules, cataloger A would necessarily end up
with the same result for a certain resource as cataloger B. This ideal
(which is, of course, unachievable even under RAK) can obviously reached
much easier by formal criteria than by using criteria of content.
Another consequence of this ideal is that RAK has always tried to cover
every possible case. So, German catalogers get very dissatisfied if they
come upon a case which is not covered by the rules. Also, using formal
criteria usually takes up less time than pondering criteria of content.
On the other hand, my feeling is that cataloger's judgment is seen as
something quite positive in the Anglo-American world, and it is accepted
that this will lead to different results. There is more "built-in"
freedom in the rules (even more so in RDA than in AACR2).
The German community will need to learn to cope with this new freedom.
It won't be easy ;-)
Heidrun
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Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
