As a newspaper cataloger, I've followed the discussion about uniform titles
with great interest and have until now resisted the impulse to muddy the
waters with additional opinion.

Similar to identically titled labor publications Rick mentions, we often see
common newspaper titles; examples are "The News" and "The Press".  It is not
unheard of that identical titles also have identical places and dates of
publication (corporate body qualification usually is not an option),
requiring additional qualification by frequency of publication, or identical
places and frequency, requiring qualification by place and date.  What with
splits, mergers, absorptions, etc., and changes in mastheads, a "family" of
thirty or more related titles is not unheard of.

So while it bothers me that the uniform title, defined for collocation, is
employed to construct unique titles, I must be grateful for the device and
would otherwise despair at constructing meaningful links among records.

And while I'm politically in favor of diversity, I do have concerns (enhanced
by a working environment in which we consult source copy from different
databases and deposit our cataloging, via the CONSER tapes, in different
databases) about the overall impact of catalogers choosing different means of
qualifying titles (I guess I worry alot) and records for the same title
winding up in one database with different "unique" titles (depending on
whether or not matching algorithms cause records to be overwritten).

Equally disturbing to me is the direction to construct a uniform title to
resolve conflict "in the catalog" and not to predict a conflict, cause I have
a hard time deciding which catalog is mine.  And in this case, I worry about
records for different titles winding up in the same database with identical
"unique" titles.

I suspect the solution to the latter problem would be somewhat radical.

Lynne Hayman
California Newspaper Project
Univ. of California, Riverside
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University of California
Riverside, CA  92521