Human Rights Watch Newsletters (Jeffrey Myers-Hayer)
Ann Ercelawn 27 Sep 1994 18:09 UTC
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 14:00:14 +0000 (GMT)
From: JEFFREY MYERS-HAYER <JMYERSHA@MAIL.LOC.GOV>
Subject: HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH NEWSLETTERS
There has been a good deal of discussion recently concerning LC's
cataloging of the Human Rights Watch newsletters. Most of these
newsletters originated as:
News from <Region> Watch
which changed to:
<Region> Watch
and now to:
Human Rights Watch/<Region>.
In almost all cases, each issue focuses on a single topic,
prominently stated on the chief source. Although LC views these
publications as periodicals, a few libraries have created
monograph analytic records, based on the theme titles. To
preclude LC catalogers creating separate monograph records, we
decided to create authority records to note that these are
serials, not monograph series. (This is done on authority
records by coding field 008/ 12 as "z".) Since the titles on
most of the authority records would be identical to the names of
the bodies, the titles had to be qualified. The choice of
qualifier did not fit RI 1.6, because the title is not that of a
"series". Following the guidelines in RI 25.5B,5, we chose an
appropriate element extracted from the work, in this case,
"newsletter". This resulted in authority records such as:
Americas Watch (Newsletter), and: Human Rights Watch/ Americas
(Newsletter).
Once the authority records were established, the headings on the
bibliographic records had to match them. That is why each serial
is entered under a uniform title despite the lack of a conflict.
LC's policy office was consulted on these decisions.
Resolving this situation by using "<Body> (Newsletter)" seems to
reflect both the publisher's and the users' understanding of this
set of publications.
