---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 11:09:02 EDT
From: Enrique E. Gildemeister <EEGLC%CUNYVM.bitnet@uvmvm.uvm.edu>
Subject: Re: Variant uniform titles (Carol Shapiro)

Carol --

You're abslolutely right. The debate on qualifiers for uniform title has
been going on for what seems like eons. Many people want corporate body
qualifier, but you end up having to treat the change in body/body name as
a title change every time a new body is associated with the serials --
tons of successive entries. You also get cases where the identity of the
body is hidden and known only through reference sources. The IWW
(Wobblies) and the Communist Paty U.S.A. often used crytonyms on their
mastheads.

Mitch made the good point that you unnecessarily end up creating
bottlenecks in cases of titles already established and you don't want to
go back retrospectively and recatalog everything. The issue of constant
new changes to existing records with old practices used in $DLC $c DLC
records speaks for itself. We have tons of materials at Lehman College
about Second language acquisitions, but you wouldn't know it because
before that 650 was established in 1988, all titles on that subject were
subsumed under Language acquisition. If you want to know what Lehman has
on Second language acquisition, the poor user has to know this bit of what
constitutes trivia unnecessarily imposed on users. Do we need to tell them
about it. No, I throw my hands up in despair!

Coming back to serials my weird approach at least gives the user the title
with an added entry, so to speak, for the body. Let me tell you what
Dorothy Glasby retired Assistant Chief of Serial Record Division at LC
told me: "This RI has been changed so many times, that I despair of any
action that would make this RI any more palatable to serials catalogers.
We at LC have done nothing further on this. We did not feel that your
proposal solves all the problems with LCRI 25.5B". I gave a presentation
at the Committee to Study serials cataloging where I presented examples of
place/date used instead of corporate body in a large number cases. The
idea is to avoid unnecessary title changes and really all I wanted to do
was get the CONSER people to fess up to the fact that they've disregarded
their own LCRI's to do what *common sense* requires. My proposals were
very elaborate, and what we hashed out at the meeting that it really has
to be individual judgment rights expanded rather than trying to shoehorn
every single problem into an admittedly inadequate RI.

Well, I think this about does it, and I like the revised RI (partly IMHO
because I was the change agent) and I'm very satisfied with the new
leeway. Mitch has his own plans to recommend 730, but I fully understand
his caveat that the poor check-in clerks are going to be saddled with
scrutinizing every new issue for possible changes.

Was it Sartre who wrote the play "No exit?" ;-)

*******************************************************************
* Rick Gildemeister                                               *
* Head of Cataloging/OCLC Enhance Coordinator                     *
* Lehman College, CUNY                                            *
*                            "Facilis descensus Averno"           *
* Voice: (718) 960-7773                                           *
* Fax:   (718) 960-8952                                           *
* BITNET:    eeglc@cunyvm                                         *
* Internet:  eeglc@cunyvm.cuny.edu                                *
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