On 16/12/2013 21.09, Kevin M Randall wrote:
<snip>
Adam Schiff wrote:
LC's policy, however, implies that the compiled work
does not become known by its title except through the passage of time (e.g.
Whitman's Leaves of Grass), and that for newly published compiled works, a
conventional collective title must be used instead.
What I would really like to see is some kind of justification for this idea.
Is there any evidence that catalog users or the general public do NOT know the
the title of a compilation by the title that appears on its title page?
Can anyone tell me--with a straight face--that the book "Everything is nice : collected
stories, sketches and plays" is not known to anyone by that title, but rather is known by the
title "Works. Selections. 2012"???
</snip>
Of course, our predecessors understood--probably better then we do--that
nobody will ever search for "Works" or "Selections". That was not the
purpose of collective uniform titles. It turns out that this is an
example of how the transfer from card/print catalogs to online catalogs
changed something very fundamental in the workings of the catalog. It is
clearest to show this through an example.
If we examine the "Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum"
(that is, Panizzi's catalog where only volume 1 came out and because of
popular outrage, it was stopped and the Royal Investigation began) the
purpose of these "collective titles" (which didn't really "exist" as
they do today) was used for *arrangement*, and there was no need for
anybody to search for them because once you found a person's name, the
first things you saw were the "Works" and "Selections" etc. As a result,
when you found the person, you found their works (if there were any).
To see how it worked, we can use the wonders of Google Books to look in
Panizzi's catalog under Aristophanes:
http://books.google.it/books?id=cE0MAQAAMAAJ&hl=it&pg=PA317#v=onepage&q&f=false
and we immediately see "Works" (didn't have to search for it) and after
browsing we eventually come to "Separate Works".
If we look under the more complex arrangement under Aristotle
http://books.google.it/books?id=cE0MAQAAMAAJ&hl=it&pg=PA321#v=onepage&q&f=false,
we see "Works" and eventually (much farther along) we come to "Two or
More Separate Works" (or our "Selections"). This reveals an *incredibly
complex* arrangement, with see references everywhere to other places in
the catalog, and we can begin to understand the outrage among the people
who saw this catalog and why they demanded an investigation.
These arrangements were transferred wholesale into the card catalog.
This can be seen in the Princeton scanned catalog, where we find the
following arrangement for Aristotle:
http://imagecat1.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/ECC/srchguides/sub/1371.500000&r=1.000000.
Even more complex is Cicero
http://imagecat1.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/ECC/srchguides/sub/5280.500000&r=1.000000.
Complete works and selected works were often interfiled. With the card
catalog, at least some very nice notes were possible.
All of these careful arrangements *completely disintegrated* when they
were placed into the computer catalog. Since computers are rather
mindless, the uniform title "Works" is now placed alphabetically under
the author's name ("W") and as a consequence, people are supposed to
*actively search* for "Works" (or browse to "W") although everybody,
including our predecessors, have always known that no one will ever do
that. So, I agree that collective uniform titles do not work, but it is
also true that they haven't worked for a long, long, long time.
Does it then follow that these collective uniform titles are useless?
That people *do not want* the group of records collocated under "Cicero,
Marcus Tullius. Selections. English"? I think they do want that, but
those groups of records are impossible for people to find in our current
catalogs. Changing it to "Cicero, Marcus Tullius. *Works.* Selections.
English" is certainly no improvement at all for the user and seems
senseless.
But, is it possible to make collective uniform titles useful and
functional for today's information tools? I believe they could and that
people would appreciate it, but that would take complete reconsideration
from the user's point of view--something I don't see happening very soon.
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
First Thus http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
First Thus Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/FirstThus
Cooperative Cataloging Rules
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Cataloging Matters Podcasts
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/p/cataloging-matters-podcasts.html
To unsubscribe from RDA-L send an e-mail to the following address from the
address you are subscribed under to:
lists...@listserv.lac-bac.gc.ca
In the body of the message:
SIGNOFF RDA-L
