statement of responsibility Archives - Page 2 of 2

Chronomanifestes 1950-2010 / Bernard Tschumi. (OCLC #871243007)

The phrase “Collection Frac Centre” appears many places on this exhibition catalog; which element should it be recorded in? This was a subject of debate at yesterday’s meeting!

The title page has “Chronomanifestes 1950-2010” in large letters in the center, and at the top in smaller letters has “Bernard Tschumi / Collection Frac Centre”. That would normally look like Bernard’s affiliation, but the preface says otherwise: he is an architect who curated this particular exhibit from that collection. So is it part of the statement of responsibility? Other title information?

We decided that it was neither of those, but included its authorized access point as a “sponsoring body”, explained in a quoted note from the preface. I did include it as other title information in a 246 in case anyone searched for it that way based on the cover.

RDA Tip of the Week: Optional abridgement

Though the statement of responsibility (RDA 2.4) is a transcribed element (that is, it should be in the record as it appears on the piece), there is an optional instruction to abridge this element if this can be done without loss of essential information. This is typically done to omit details such as degrees or ranks, salutations like “Dr.” or “Mrs.”, or institutional affiliations. For example, a book with statement of responsibility:

    by Bob Jones, Ph.D, and Mrs. Frida Smith, University of Kentucky.

might appear in the record:

    by Bob Jones and Frida Smith.

The LCC-PC PS and NLA PS for this statement both say to generally not abridge a statement of responsibility, but many catalogers still do, keeping consistent with AACR2. At my library we tend to abridge in our original cataloging.

We recently had an example where the statement of responsibility listing five authors included the word “and” between each of the author’s names. Using this instruction, we were able to omit the extraneous “and"s and just use commas:

    by Jerry G. Pigman, Kenneth R. Agent, Patricia L. Hardyman, 
            Knowlton W. Johnson and Richard McCleary