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FOR DISCUSSION AT COMMITTEE TO STUDY SERIALS CATALOGING
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MESSAGE 2   TEXT FROM LETTER TO LC VERBATIM
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My letter to you concerns itself with the choice of qualifier for a uniform
title used as a unique serial identifier. As we know, when two or more serials
have the same title, uniform titles with qualifiers are created to differen-
tiate them. The problem, though, is deciding what qualifier.

The LCRI's allow a great deal of latitude for decision-making and tend not to
be prescriptive. The cataloger is urged to choose a qualifier appropriate to
the situation at hand. One very important exception involves the choice of
qualifier for titles that would normally get a place qualifier, but, because
addition of place does not resolve the conflict (i.e. both serials have the
same title and are/were published in the same place), an alternative qualifier
must be assigned by the cataloger to resolve the conflict and ensure that
each serial will have a unique title. In such a case, the LCRI's are flatly
prescriptive, calling for the assignment of corporate body qualifier.

Opinions on this provision in the cataloging canon abound, and perhaps no
other rule, or should I say no other rule interpretation (the issue does not
come up in AACR2r) has been more controversial than this one. What is most
problematic about this provision is that a change of corporate body in the
uniform title always requires that the cataloger treat the change also as a
a title change, even though the title proper of the serial has not, in fact,
changed. Furthermore, the LCRI's provide no alternative, when some other way
of resolving the conflict, such as place and date, is probably warranted.

In what cases is some other method of differentiation warranted? Common sense
tells you that place/date is a better choice when dealing with serials issued
by a succession of commercial publishers, publishers not prominently named,
or with serials which at one point or another lack affiliation with any
corporate body at all. Especially when doing retrospective cataloging of runs
of serials with common titles, published in large, prominent cities like New
York or Chicago, if one applies literally the provision of corporate body
qualifier, one ends up with a succession of what I call "artificial" title
changes. On the other hand, the provision of corporate body qualifier and
successive title changes is certainly warranted in the case of serials that
are official organs of named bodies whose function goes far beyond issuing
or publishing the serial.

Well, in fact, LC and the CONSER libraries have been using place/date in the
former cases all along, but there has never been documentation or guidance
supporting this practice. The result is that one learns to apply this policy
by inferring its validity from the bibliographic records of LC and the
CONSER libraries. The average cataloger, who is probably not in the know, is
left waffling, precisely at a time when we're supposed to be less literal
and rigid, in the interest of cataloging simplification.