Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Uncategorized

La naissance du texte proustien / édité par Sjef Houppermans, Nell de Hullu-van Doeselaar, Manet van Montfrans, Annelies Schulte Nordholt, Sabine van Wesemael. (OCLC #863433093)

This collection of essays has five editors with Dutch names (one of them hyphenated!), so I got to look up the RDA rules for their recording/sorting these. RDA F.11.3 (on Dutch and Flemish names) says to record the part following the prefix first, unless the prefix is “ver”, in which case the prefix comes first. Apparently “ver” is a contraction of “van der” and is often joined to the front of the surname, as in Johannes Vermeer, though the example given in RDA (Ver Boven, Daisy) is not joined. Even if not actually joined, it seems reasonable to shelve the Dutch “Vermeer"s and "Ver Meer”’s together.

Categories
Uncategorized

RDA Tip of the Week: 33X ǂa or ǂb ?

RDA MARC records include the new 336/337/338 fields to record Content Type, Media Type and Carrier Type respectively. Each of these fields can use a term (like “text” in ǂa) and/or a shorter code (like “txt” in ǂb) for this information:

336 __ ǂa text ǂb txt ǂ2 rdacontent
337 __ ǂa unmediated ǂb n ǂ2 rdamedia
338 __ ǂa volume ǂb nc ǂ2 rdacarrier

If there are multiple types of content or carriers, the field should be repeated, possibly with a ǂ3 indicating which part you referring to:

336 __ ǂa performed music ǂb prm ǂ2 rdacontent
337 __ ǂa audio ǂb s ǂ2 rdamedia
338 __ ǂa audio disc ǂb sd ǂ2 rdacarrier
336 __ ǂa text ǂb txt ǂ2 rdacontent ǂ3 liner notes
337 __ ǂa unmediated ǂb n ǂ2 rdamedia ǂ3 liner notes
338 __ ǂa volume ǂb nc ǂ2 rdacarrier ǂ3 liner notes

Documentation varies on whether both ǂa and ǂb should be recorded in the same field. In practice, I commonly see both in the same field even in DLC records, but also see only the term used quite a bit.

Categories
Uncategorized

Die Astronomische Gesellschaft 1863 – 2013 : Bilder und Geschichten aus 150 Jahren / herausgegeben von Dietrich Lemke. (OCLC #870898902)

This festschrift (!) about the history of a German astronomical society needed original cataloging because there was no English-language record for it, only German. That is, we needed a record where the transcribed elements (e.g. title, statement of responsibility) were still in German, but many recorded elements (e.g. pagination, bibliographical references) were in English.

From OCLC Bib Formats: “Historically in WorldCat the absence of subfield ‡b has indicated that English is the language of cataloging. OCLC now recommends always coding this element."  Also, 936 is no longer used to link parallel records.

Categories
Uncategorized

Between pulpit and pew [electronic resource] : the supernatural world in Mormon history and folklore / W. Paul Reeve and Michael Scott Van Wagenen, editors. (vendor record) (and others)

One of these last batches of vendor records had some very strange “ISBNs”. I was not checking check digits (though maybe I should), just bad patterns/lengths. Some of these even appear in 020ǂa, not 020ǂz.

Categories
Uncategorized

Записки неохотника : неполное собрание текстов / Борис Ванталов. (OCLC #654857782)

This piece was forwarded to me for subject heading work when it was identified as possibly being literary criticism, possibly due to the Z in the second cutter of its existing call number: PG3489.3.A53 Z16 2008

This particular book appears primarily to be a collection of works of the author (mini-novels, essays, etc) so I would classify it “Separate works. By title” in Table P-PZ40, which is .xA61-.xZ458. (I could also see an argument for .A6, “Selected works. Selections”, but I don’t think any of the included texts had previous wide publication.) The romanized title starts “Zapiski” so second cutter is early in the Z’s.

That Z is often a good signal though; general literary criticism for an author with a single cutter does get second cutter .Z5-.Z999, so it is shelved after all of the author’s actual works.

There was some literary criticism included near the end of the book, so I added the subject heading anyway to aid in discovery.

Categories
Uncategorized

Classic problems of probability / Prakash Gorroochurn. (OCLC #757478610).

Mr. Sunday’s Saturday night chicken / Lorraine Wallace. (OCLC #774024192)

The first title was already in our collection; the second was in a DDA record pool and detected as a possible duplicate because their records share an ISBN!

The chicken book does have the ISBN in an 020ǂz (Cancelled/Invalid ISBN) but we are checking those as well because they often contain the ISBNs of the title from other ebook publishers or in other formats.

This particular ISBN (9781118063255) is a popular one; OCLC has it in records for eight distinct titles!

Categories
Uncategorized

K otázce pronikání německého imperialismu na jihovýchod v období před rokem 1918 = Zur Frage des Vordringens des deutschen Imperialismus nach dem Südosten im Zeitabschnitt vor 1918 / Zdeněk Jindra. Iredentistická činnost nacionalisticky̌ch němců ČSR a jejich podpora imperialistickými a militaristickými kruhy německa v letech 1918-1923 = Die irredentistische Tätigkeit der nationalistischen Deutschen in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik und ihre Unterstützung durch die imperialistischen und militaristischen Kreise Deutschlands in den Jahren 1918-1923 / Koloman Gajan. (OCLC #869969589)

This was the only volume of this series (in our collection) that did not have its own unique title. It seemed messy to just have it as the only volume on a serial record, and a “Philosophy and History. no. 2” style monograph title didn’t seem much better, so I considered the piece to be collection of two articles with no collective title. That choice, plus the parallel titles, makes this the longest 245 I’ve seen in recent memory. (I wonder what the longest one in my catalog is?) It is also a nice reminder that 245ǂc is “Statement of responsibility, etc.” because it can also include additional titles and their subtitles, parallel titles, statements of responsibility, etc.

Connexion was initially upset with me for including both Polish and German accented characters in one field, so I had to hunt them down and convert them all to MARC-8 style combination. Thanks to the speaker at Midwinter who told us about Connexion’s “Edit -> MARC-8 Characters -> Verify” function, this will go more quickly next time!

Categories
Uncategorized

RDA Tip of the Week: No brackets in notes

In a bibliographical references note in an RDA record, page numbers should never be surrounded by square brackets, even when the pages mentioned do not actually have numbers printed on them. For example:

504 __ ǂa Includes bibliographical references (pages 204-208) and index.

(even if the logical page 204 doesn’t actually have that number printed on it)

More generally, the LC-PCC PS for RDA 1.7.1 regarding punctuation in notes says not to use square brackets in any notes except quoted notes. That is, only when you are quoting something that actually has brackets on it, should you include them. For example:

500 __ ǂa "The best book about punctuation, including [, ], <, and >"--Page 4 of cover.

Categories
Uncategorized

Katalog der Handschriften des Augustiner Chorherrenstiftes Klosterneuburg / Alois Haidinger. (OCLC #36123526)

How many numbers does this thing have? Band 434, “Reihe II, Band 2”, Teil 3, COD 201-300? Ack! Teil 2 of this set (Band 225 of the series) has two volumes itself (“Katalogband” and “Registerband”) plus a supplement (“Beiheft”), so this was an exercise in series statements/labeling that hopefully turned out legible.

Categories
Uncategorized

النهاية في مجرد الفقه والفتاوى / لأبي جعفر محمد بن الحسن بن علي الطوسي. (OCLC #15744405) and others.

Where is UAR on the shelf? (Uncataloged ARabic?)

About 20 years ago, the library received some Middle Eastern books which were then cataloged for circulation purposes, without being fully described. We eventually hired students to transcribe the title pages so that they could be fully cataloged, but some of the original (very brief) provisional records were never replaced.

Are these records useful now? Some have LCCNs as call numbers (!), and we do have some of those titles in the catalog on full records. We have migrated systems since the brief records were created, so no history is attached to them.

I am deleting the records for now; if these books ever materialize from their mysterious location, I’ll catalog them properly at that point!