On Thu, 13 Oct 1994 18:59:26 EST Lynne Hayman said:
>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.

Lynne, in the labor serials project we had a number of newspapers that fit
the CONSER definition of a newspaper. A number of "ethnic" foreign language
publication fell under that rubric because they are a source of general news
for their readers. Your discussion of the "family" is *so* on the mark. We
used to design flowcharts, and each title had to be researched for citation
purposes for conflicts. You couldn't finish any one record until they all
were done because the links required that uniform title. And corporate body
qualifiers don't go. I had a German labor paper which was an official organ
of a radical group, but I followed the CONSER newspaper cataloging guidelines
and used place and date. As an aside, Yiddish titles and German titles would
conflict. Those were the days when people were trying to "clean Yiddish up"
and bring it more in conformity with its step-cousin, German.

>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.

I know, how else do you link in such a situation (my G-d, someone really
understands!)

>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).

Our project was done at an RLIN library, where everyone has their own record.
You've neatly spelled out the problems in union-listing these beasts.

>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 can't remember, I think it's in the LCRI's that "the catalog" can mean
anywhere. We had all sorts of neat bibliographies, guides, and union lists
that we treated as all part of "the catalog", *and* we didn't predict
conflicts, but we hunted for them in the tools just described, which is
kosher. This is a different issue from the one brought out in the LCRI that
you don't go back to the original title and qualify it *because* we entered
all of them at the same time (family gatherings again, so mama duck and daddy
duck all had nice qualifiers as they waddled into the ark). Unfortunately,
as you point out, depending on what it was you saw in the catalog would
determine the form of the uniform title; what did the other person see? You're
right, it's a problem. A slightly related problem: I was establishing a name
for an English lady of the 18th century. The LCRI said that the form in the
Dictionary of National Biography should be preferred to the form on the
chief source. Well, there was an English short-title catalog project which
participated in NACO and had established the name as found on the piece.
Puzzled, I called OCLC's master cataloger Robert Bremer, who said to me, "Rick,
they probably didn't *have* (emphasis mine) the dictionary".

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

What's a person to do? Lynne, I'm really grateful to you. Your explanation
of the problems of uniform titles has that sense of immediacy, precision,
and specificity -- and freshness, too -- that I wish I had (which is why I
made sure at my presentation last Midwinter on this to bring along lots of
examples) because it's been a long time (1984-87) since I was involved with
the type of material you're discussing. Your message is, for me, like a walk
down memory lane, and so clearly phrased. Bravo, Lynne!!

Rick Gildemeister
Cataloger/OCLC Enhance Coordinator
Lehman College, CUNY