Month: January 2015

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Fabrication [to construct by assembling diverse parts] and fabrication [an untruthful statement] / edited by Amit Wolf. (OCLC #880682694)

I struggled with whether to include the bracket punctuation that appears in this title; the brackets do appear on the title page, but might be interpreted as saying that the content in them (“to construct by assembling diverse parts”, “an untruthful statement”) came from somewhere other than on the piece.

RDA 1.7.3 on Transcription of Punctuation says to transcribe punctuation as it appears on the source, and has examples including ellipses (…) which might cause similar confusion.

The brackets themselves will usually not affect searching (in many systems, they are ignored for word/phrase indexing), but I did include a variant title that only included only the words in the larger font:

246 3_ ǂa Fabrication and fabrication
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The warlock’s book : secrets of black magic from the ancient grimoires / by Peter Haining ; illustrated by George Underwood based on original woodcuts. (OCLC #6671654)

In OCLC, variation in printing, manufacture or distribution date alone does not justify creating a new record. Though this item was printed in 1973, the manifestation (edition) was published in 1971, so we can use a 1971 record. A printing date can additionally be recorded in the record:

260 __ ǂa Secaucus, N.J. : ǂb Citadel Press, ǂc [1971], 1973 printing.

but only the publication information goes in the fixed fields:

DtSt: s   Date1: 1971  Date2: ____
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Les cités magiques / Jean-Michel Angebert. (OCLC #1503805)

This book describes seven magic cities, whose names are not in the title of the book. We would also not generally include all of them as subject headings, because of the rule of three; they are summarized by the single heading:

650 _0 ǂa Cities and towns ǂv Miscellanea.

For subject access by individual cities, our best bet is to count on keyword access via the contents note:

505 0_ ǂa Thèbes, cité royale -- Jérusalem, cité sainte -- Rome, la
    ville éternelle -- Prague, la ville aux cent tours -- Machu-Pichu,
    la cité perdue des Andes -- Bénarès, la ville sacrée -- Lhassa et
    son double : Schamballah.
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The Oprah phenomenon / edited by Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson ; with a foreword by Robert J. Thompson. (OCLC #900086861)

The foreword by Robert J. Thompson is advertised on the cover, so seemed like useful information to include. Though it does not appear on the title page, I added it to the statement of responsibility without brackets; RDA 2.4.2.2 says that it may be taken from anywhere on the resource, and only needs brackets if it is taken from somewhere outside the resource.

I also wanted to add an authorized access point for Robert J. Thompson, but he has a very common name. A search for “robert thompson” in the authority file brought up more than a hundred results (including variants like Bob and Bobby) many of which had helpful qualifiers like “Musician” but most of which only had a date of birth.

The book does not provide his date of birth, but does note his affiliation with Syracuse University. Using this information, I found a Wikipedia article for him, which provided his date of birth, as well as several other works by him. I searched OCLC for some of these other works, and used them to identify his access point:

700 1_ Thompson, Robert J., ǂd 1959- ǂe writer of foreword.

His name authority record is very brief. Had it identified him as a media scholar (as the title of the wikipedia article does) or included his affiliation with Syracuse, that would have saved some work; I’m glad that RDA is leaning that way for authority work.

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The essential cult TV reader / edited by David Lavery. (OCLC #897377307)

As this title includes a filmography separate from the rest of the bibliographical references, I included an additional note (as 504 is repeatable):

504 __ ǂa Includes bibliographical references and index.
504 __ ǂa Includes filmography.

There is also a value for this (q) in the fixed field Cont:

Cont: bq

The code ‘q’ is far down in the alphabet, and there are only four spaces in the Cont fixed field, so this code may not be always be recorded if the title has a lot of other specific contents. For example, the item was a thesis (m) which also included abstracts/summaries (a), a bibliography (b), a discography (k), and a filmography (q), the fixed field would be:

Cont: abkm
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Invincibility of the liberation movement / Boris Ponomarev. (OCLC #16541895)

An OCLC record very closely matched the piece I had in hand; the only difference was that it had 37 pages, where the 300 ǂa said “27 pages”. Had there been other differences I would have thought the record represented a distinct item, but I followed the guidance on when to create a new record:

Differences indicative of a distinct bibliographic item usually occur in more than one field. If a difference occurs in a single field, determine whether there are two separate bibliographic items with only one significant difference or whether the difference is an error or a difference in opinion. If in doubt, use the existing record.

The font used for page numbers is pretty thick, so I can see how the cataloger could have made this mistake. I corrected the master record and added our holdings.

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It’s amazing the things you find when people retire and mail you the problem piles that result from cleaning their offices. Why did these things stay in processing limbo instead of moving out into the collection? It’s a mystery, but one that often doesn’t matter – the real question is, where should they go now?

This printout stuck in a nearly-cataloged book is from around 2003, so is probably from OCLC Passport? The call number label is no longer sticky, which is fine, because it is not the one we’d choose for this volume. Maybe that was the problem.

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Istorii︠a︡ grazhdanskoĭ voĭny i intervent︠s︡ii v SSSR : sovremennai︠a︡ burzhuaznai︠a︡ istoriografii︠a︡ / V.P. Naumov, A.A. Kosakovskiĭ. (OCLC #26511741)

Subfield ǂa of 050 is repeatable, and I often see this feature used for titles in a series. For example:

050 04 ǂa D410 ǂb .N652 1976, no. 11 ǂa DK265.9.H5

The first call number should be used if you class the series together under one call number:

D410 .N652 1976, no. 11

(That’s D410 for 20th century periodicals, cuttered on the romanized name of the series: Novoe v zhizni, nauke, tekhnike. Serii︠a︡ “Istorii︠a︡”)

The second class number is provided for those who class the series separately, with a specific call number for each volume. In this case, that is:

DK265.9.H5

(History of Russia, Revolution, 1917-1921, Historiography). Subfield ǂb is not repeatable, so no item number is provided.

We class this series separately, so I used the second class number, adding a cutter for the author, Naumov:

090 ǂa DK265.9.H5 ǂb N37 1976
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Percepción y variación lingüística : enfoque sociocognitivo / Rocío Caravedo. (OCLC #894227744)

When classifying this title, I assigned the class number P120.V37 (variation in language) followed by a cutter for the main entry (Caravedo). Just following the Cutter table from the Subject Cataloging Manual on Shelflisting, I would have assigned the cutter C37:

  • C as the first letter of Caravedo
  • 3 for the letter a following an initial consonant
  • 7 for expansion, as the next letter r is between p-s

CI browsed Library of Congress’s catalog in the area of P120.V37 C and spotted a similar title with call number P120.V37 C37 1997, with the second cutter based on the main entry Caro. I shifted that cutter slightly for the title in hand, so that it would file correctly, with Caravedo before Caro:

    P120.V37 C36 2014
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Die Ausgewanderten : vier lange Erzählungen / W.G. Sebald. (OCLC #899212280)

First original cataloging of the new year – fortunately, it was an easy one, as there was good copy from a previous edition to derive from, though there were differences (publisher, publication year) that justified a new record in OCLC.

Happy New Year!