For quite some time now I've been very vocal about relaxing the policies
for qualifiers for uniform titles for serials. My main thrust has been
to find ways around using corporate body as the qualifier when one deems
it appropriate. There's been quite a bit of discussion on this, so I'll
skip a lengthy explication and say that choice of corporate body as qualifier
creates a lot of problems.

I've done a lot of thinking on this, and I have done a mental "legislative
history," reviewing LCRI 25.5B from its beginnings. Originally corporate
body was the first choice in most cases, as place is now. For all the reasons
hashed and rehashed over the months, place won out in the end.

It occurs to me however, that in the case of series, you're dealing with a
whole entity with its own title, and the series information given second
place by the typography and layout. If a user were to browse a file of
a traced series, and there was a place qualifier, but that place did not
appear on the book, they'd think it was an error. Likewise, DLC copy catalogers
would do a lot of head-scratching over it. However, a corporate body
qualifier would always match the book in hand's publisher, since change of
body requires establishing a new corporate body qualifier; (if the place of
publication changed you would not want to create a new uniform title). Again,
if the publisher changed, one would simply create a new series authority
with the new publisher as qualifier and make 530's. This is different from
creating a new bibliographic record for a serial.
The upshot of this is that corporate body is actually desirable in such a
case.

Dorothy Glasby, the former Assistant Chief of the Serial Record Division,
told me in a letter that LC had seriously considered dropping uniform titles
completely, except for traced series. I have a feeling that what I'm dealing
with has probably been discussed at LC, as Dorothy Glasby and Regina Reynolds,
Head of NSDP, have both said that many discussions on uniform titles have
taken place, involving many, many people.

Sometimes I feel like a crackpot, mulling all this over, but I worked on a
retrospective cataloging project involving very difficult radical and labor
union serials, and since there have been so many left-labor publications
with a slogan title (e.g. Vanguard), and these left groups are/were in
a small number of large cities, we had to deal a lot with publications
issued with the same title in the same place. We tore our hair out in situa-
tions where corporate body (the qualifier of choice in such a case, according
to the RI 25.5B) would change constantly and then be completely dropped, or
would start out with no publisher statement and then adopt a corporate name
for the editorial staff. We created unnecessary backlogs, and some important
titles didn't get cataloged until we found LC/CONSER using place/date, and then
we decided that if it's OK for them, we'll do it, too. We were dealing with
very unique and valuable stuff, so we really wanted to follow the rules and
RI's as written.

Anyway, to get back to series, I think we're dealing with a different animal
with a different appetite. In the case of series, corporate body qualifier
is very tempting. I say tempting, because what we discussed last Midwinter
at the Committee to Study Serials Cataloging was to relax the RI and allow
more leeway for catalogers' judgment, and not be rigid or overly prescrip-
tive, period.

Rick Gildemeister
Cataloger/OCLC Enhance Coordinator
Lehman College, CUNY