Month: May 2014

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La Grande Guerre expliquée en images / Antoine Prost. (OCLC #868020225)

When you specify the number of non-filing characters for a title, you are not just saying how a title should be sorted, but also how it should be indexed. Specifically, any characters you skip will not be considered part of the title, or even the record.

For example, if you do a title search in OCLC for:

la grande guerre expliquee en images

it will return no results, because the title field’s second indicator says to skip the first three characters:

245 13 La Grande Guerre expliquée en images / ǂc Antoine Prost.

For more on what not to search for, check out my longer blog post.

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A road to change : Harlan County / by Kim Childers. (OCLC #879573322)

This book has slightly odd pagination: the blank page before the title page is marked “Page 1”, the title page is marked “Page 3” and no other pages have numbers. I considered this a change in the form of numbering, so ignored those first few numbered pages by RDA 3.4.5.4, recording the extent as:

1 volume (unpaged)

There is a DVD by this same company with similar content, based on the same research, and considered complementary. I recorded this as:

787 08 ǂi Complemented by (work): ǂa Harlan County : a road to change.

with the exact relationship described in a note.

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О войне / Клаузевиц ; перевод с немецкого А.К. Рачинского. (OCLC #879375849)

This Russian translation of Vom Kriege was published 100 years after the original, and includes a German title page in the front matter. As that title page has the original publisher and year, I chose not to treat it as parallel title page, and just included its information in a note about the original publication.

I am intrigued by how many forms of the author’s name appear in this record. In the statement of responsibility, he is just “Клаузевиц”, and the original title page has has full name “Karl von Klausewitz”. The authorized form is “Clausewitz, Carl von, 1780-1831” and this appears to be the most common form (though all of these forms appear in his authority record). I wonder which way he spelled it? (or which way his wife spelled it, as she published it after his death?)

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Deutsche Rechtschreibung : aktuell / Karin A. Stock. (OCLC #879332132)

Be careful when searching for words hyphenated across line-breaks. A search for “Recht-Schreibung” may find only hyphenated (or otherwise split) versions of the phrase, and a search for “Rechtschreibung” may find only single-word versions.

In this case, a title search for “deutsche” and “aktuell” and the author’s name (and several similar searches) narrowed the search sufficiently to determine that I needed to create a new English-language record for this title. The single word “Rechtschreibung” is used in the text of the book, though I noticed many old records using “Recht-Schreibung”; I used the single word version in the main title but added the hyphenated version as a title access point in case anybody searches that way.

(I wonder if this book, which is about German spelling reform, addresses such hyphenation?)

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Concrete : microstructure, properties, and materials / P. Kumar Mehta, Paulo J.M. Monteiro. (OCLC #879384979)

Some ebook platforms, particularly those that have formatted text instead of page scans, do not provide a traditional title page/verso to catalog from. It can also be difficult to determine the extent of the book in pages, and the presence of certain elements such as illustrations, bibliography, and index. These may also vary from platform to platform for a given title, which is a problem when you are trying to create a provider-neutral record that accurately represents them all, while only having access to one.

One way to avoid biasing the record to your available platform is to base the description (pagination, etc.) on an available print record for the title, and record this decision in a note like:

588 __ ǂa Description based on print version record.

Note that 588 is not used to indicate where you found individual elements; those notes still go in a general 500:

500 __ ǂa Title from disc label.
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Партийно-политическая работа в Вооруженных Силах / Генерал-лейтенант М.Г. Соболев. (OCLC #879351239)

For this publication about political party work in the Soviet armed forces, the statement of responsibility included the author’s military rank of Lieutenant general. Though my library’s practice is typically to abridge a statement of responsibility (removing non-essential information such as titles, ranks, or affiliations), in this case I felt it would aid with selection of the title, so retained it. Both the LC-PCC and NLA policy statements say typically not to abridge, so our policy may change in time.

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The chemistry of organozinc compounds / edited by Zvi Rappoport and Ilan Marek. (OCLC #70054225)

If Part 1 of this set has R-Zn, does Part 2 have A-Q? Though this is a multi-volume set, that R-Zn does not describe the content of just this volume; it describes the whole set!

Zn is zinc, and the list of abbreviations following the table of contents says that R stands for “any radical”. An organozinc compound contains carbon-to-zinc chemical bonds, so “R-Zn” appears to be a diagram with R as a wildcard.

Similarly, I have in hand The chemistry of organomanganese compounds which says “R-Mn”, and The chemistry of organolithium compounds, Volume 2 which says “R-Li”.

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thedigitallibrarian:

problem-cataloger:

Performance evaluation of bridges with structural bridge deck overlays (SBDO) / by James J. Griffin, Issam E. Harik and Ching Chiaw Choo. (OCLC #866579013)

There was already a James J. Griffin in the authority file, a professor (now emeritus) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Maryland. His vita does not mention this publication, or have any evidence that he is a structural engineer; this report is likely by a different author, so we had to make his heading unique in some way.

We did not know this James J. Griffin’s middle name (to build a fuller form), or date of birth, so we followed RDA 9.6.1.9 and used his profession/occupation to distinguish him:

Griffin, James J. (Structural engineer)

Haha! This is so funny!
1. How ironic is it that this publication comes across tumblr, but isn’t in my collection like its supposed to be at work? Guess I know what I’ll be doing on Monday.
2. So many people bash on RDA, but I love seeing examples of when it’s more practical then AACR2.

1. What a coincidence! Do you collect that specific series? We are in the process of adding all of these documents to our institutional repository, and are doing original cataloging for quite a few of them.

2. Glad to hear it! I’ll keep posting them as I find them. 🙂

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Performance evaluation of bridges with structural bridge deck overlays (SBDO) / by James J. Griffin, Issam E. Harik and Ching Chiaw Choo. (OCLC #866579013)

There was already a James J. Griffin in the authority file, a professor (now emeritus) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Maryland. His vita does not mention this publication, or have any evidence that he is a structural engineer; this report is likely by a different author, so we had to make his heading unique in some way.

We did not know this James J. Griffin’s middle name (to build a fuller form), or date of birth, so we followed RDA 9.6.1.9 and used his profession/occupation to distinguish him:

Griffin, James J. (Structural engineer)
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Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus / Proclus. (OCLC #70059795)

When a set is published over a period of years, it is easy for its volumes to sneak onto their own records. The set may not benefit from the subject analysis afforded by separate records, and if classification is not done consistently, volumes may be separated (or even mis-ordered) on the shelf.