One thing I want to add to my part of this discussion, as a P.S., is that
many people have found LCRI 25.5B hard to apply. The CONSER manual is defi-
nitely more helpful in problem areas than the LCRI alone; realistically,though
given the nature of serials, no LCRI or group of instructions can deal
on a micro level with every possible situation, and shouldn't try.

After much debate inside and outside LC, LC has committed itself to revise the
LCRI to provide for greater cataloger freedom and leave more up to cataloger's
judgment, since there are still a lot of situations, as I said above, that
the LCRI and the CONSER Cataloging Manual don't address. For example, what
do you do if you've assigned a corporate body qualifier for a
serial that putters along nicely but then drops the body and continues to be
issued, but without a publisher statement? Or, what about the case where you
try to make the title changes necessitated by change in issuing body or
commercial publisher only to find yourself making a sequence of what are
really artificial title changes; they are the product of an intellectual
construct (the LCRI) but you know in your gut it's all one serial.

At ALA Midwinter's meeting of the Committee to Study Serials Cataloging,
I was invited to present and participate in the discussion of a critique
and proposed revision of LCRI 25.5B that I had written and sent to LC
a while back. The general consensus was that more latitude was needed
for catalogers faced with assigning qualifiers in complex situations. Regina
Reynolds, the head of the National Serials Data Program, representing LC,
announced that a draft revision would be prepared for discussion.

Rick Gildemeister
Documents/Serials Cataloger/OCLC Enhance Coordinator
Lehman College of the City University of New York