One hundred letters home / Adam Aitken. (OCLC #947042420)

Recently on the Troublesome Catalogers facebook group, somebody asked when it is appropriate to include both “text” and “still image” as content types for a textual book with illustrations:

336  ǂa text ǂ2 rdacontent
336  ǂa still image ǂ2 rdacontent

This appears to be a matter of catalogers judgment, as well as differing policy between cataloging agencies. Some include it when a book has any illustrations, others only when a book is chiefly illustrations (such as a picture book or a graphic novel), or if the illustrations are particularly noteworthy.

I don’t think I’ve used this much, but when considering it, I typically think – if a patron were to limit their search to images, would they be happy if they found this book?

This particular title had about 30 mostly-small black-and-white illustrations (including portaits, facsimiles) spread out over 300 pages. This did not seem substantial enough to merit the added content type, so I removed it for our local copy.