On 12/20/2013 2:49 PM, Heidrun Wiesenmüller wrote:
<snip>
Adger Williams wrote:
Aren't conventional collective titles really Form/Genre headings?
(Poems. Selections, vs. Essays Selections, vs. Works Selections)
Would they not serve their function less confusingly if we treated
them that way?
Quite. They could be seen as attributes of the work and recorded in
RDA elements 7.2 and 7.3 - in addition to the "ordinary" title of the
work for the compilation/collection (RDA element 6.2).
If this was consistently applied, it would give us the possibility to find
A) all editions of a certain compilation/collection (making use of the
title of the work)
B) all compilations/collections of a certain type (making use of the
attributes of the work)
And everybody would be happy :-)
</snip>
But people can do this right now, and they have been to do so for over a
hundred and fifty years! As I tried to show, the problem is elsewhere.
Something that was designed for a print environment collapsed when
transferred into a computer environment and was never fixed.
Nobody can find these titles under any of the forms of titles I have
seen (who would ever think to search for the words "works" or
"selections" or even worse: "works. selections"). So, if any of it is
going to be useful, that means these titles must become findable to the
general public, otherwise the collective uniform titles just become
complex and useless appendages to our records.
This is a fundamental problem and to fix it, we must do more than just
find other words to use (omnium gatherum?) because this goes beyond
specific words, just as our 19th-century predecessors understood. They
solved it an a unique and brilliant way for their times: by special
filing of the cards and what would have been difficult was suddenly very
simple. That is why I suggested something new: the word cloud where
those titles become obvious.
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/2013/12/re-rda-l-collective-cities-that-is.html
So the titles that are pretty much useless now *could* turn out to be
useful (at least I think so), but I very well could be shown to be
wrong. If new attempts to make these titles findable by the public are
not successful and/or it turns out that the collective uniform titles
really are simply obsolete holdovers from the card catalog, as suggested
by Mac, then let's get rid of them and good riddance! It would be great
to get rid of some work (besides getting rid of the rule of three and
similar "savings").
The worst thing to do would be to continue a practice that is seen to be
definitely obsolete--since many people think that is what cataloging is
today anyway. That is not what I think of course, but why give
ammunition to the budget cutters?
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
First Thus http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
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