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Your Bar/Bat mitzvah : Pareshah and Haftarah with commentary. Vayishlach, Genesis 32:4 to 36:43 / Union of American Hebrew Congregations. (OCLC #1002064723)

The title proper of this piece “Your Bar/Bat mitzvah” has a forward slash in it, which is a punctuation mark used in ISBD to precede the first statement of responsibility. Is anyone going to be confused by this record, and think it is the title “Your Bar” written by “Bat mitzvah”? It doesn’t seem likely.

AACR2 had this concern with a few punctuation marks, as described in AACR2 1.1B1:

If the title proper as given in the chief source of information includes the punctuation marks … or [ ], replace them by – and ( ), respectively.

But RDA’s primary rule for this (1.7.3) is “Transcribe punctuation as it appears on the source” allowing the Alternative “If transcribing punctuation as it appears on the source significantly hinders clarity, either omit or modify the punctuation, as necessary.”

So if we thought our patrons might be confused and read this as an author named Bat Mitzvah, we could modify punctuation in the title proper for clarity.

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La Capponiera / Girolamo Muzio ; con un’introduzione all’autore, all’opera, testo e note a cura di Beatrice Paolozzi e Riccardo Fubini. (OCLC #983213005)

RDA 2.12.9 on Numbering within series points to the general guidelines for Numbers expressed as numerals or words (RDA 1.8). RDA 1.8.2 on Form of Numerals has the general instruction to recording the numbering in the form preferred by the cataloging agency (like Arabic numerals) but includes alternatives to record numbering as it appears on the piece, as has been done in this case:

    490 1_ ǂa Studi / Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere La
        Colombaria ; ǂv CCXVI

Another alternative allows additionally adding numbering in the form preferred by the cataloging agency, bracketed to indicate that that form was taken from outside the source, like:

    490 1_ ǂa Studi / Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere La
        Colombaria ; ǂv CCXVI [216]
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Modeling history. (OCLC #988928518)

Sometimes I receive oddly-shaped materials for cataloging, such as this book with uncut pages (on the bottom) that are intended to stay uncut. Only the outsides are numbered, and the resulting “pocket” in many cases holds loose photos/cards. I was able to find copy (thank you EYM), so didn’t have to wonder about this one very long.

The physical description is done as:

300  __ ǂa 63 pages : ǂb illustrations (some color) ; ǂc 29 cm
    + ǂe 16 cards.

This is correct, as 63 is the last numbered page in the volume. While it is thicker than the average 63-page book, using this number is not “misleading” in a RDA 3.4.5.5 sense; it correctly describes the number of pages with content, and similar standards are followed for traditional Japanese books with double leaves.

They did include a concise note to explain the weirdness:

500 __ ǂa Pages uncut at bottom, with cards inserted between
    pages in photography section.
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Trees of Appalachia : a guide to common native species / photos & text: Keith A. Bradley. (OCLC #930539164)

This guide to trees in Appalachia is laminated; if you’re specifically looking for a resource that won’t be damaged when you cram it into your hiking pack or drop it into the river, this feature would be nice to see in the catalog record.

RDA 3.6 on Base Material says that the element is not core, but should be recorded if considered important for identification or selection. A list of values is provided, with the instruction that “If none of the terms in the list is appropriate or sufficiently specific, use another concise term or terms to indicate a base material.” We didn’t feel like any of them (even “plastic”) were precise/clear enough, so we went with “laminated paper”. The RDA-MARC mapping in RDA Toolkit says that this element (along with many others) is recorded in 300ǂb:

    300  1 folded sheet (12 unnumbered pages) :
      ǂb laminated paper, chiefly color illustrations ;
      ǂc 24 cm
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Inorganic experiments / edited by J. Derek Woollins. (OCLC #496229687)

RDA’s General Guideline for English Language Capitalization (RDA A.10) is basically to follow the Chicago Manual of Style. CMOS 10.66 on Naming conventions for chemical elements says that “symbols all have an initial capital” and “names of elements are always lowercased”, as found in various titles in this title’s contents note:

  Two-stage synthesis of Ph₂P(O)(CH₂)₄P(O)Ph₂ 
  Preparation of an iron dinitrogen complex 
  Nickel-catalyzed cross-coupling of alkylmagnesium with haloarene

Nickel is capitalized in that last title, following RDA A.4.1, which says the capitalize the first word of a title.

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Adding the author relator term to this record’s 100 field was slightly tricky: it started as:

100 1_ ǂa Lee, Vladimir Ya.

but that period at the end was not added to the end of the 100; it is part of the access point itself. The author was born in Russian Federation, and Ya (Я) appears to be his middle initial, so we keep its period accordingly:

100 1_ ǂa Lee, Vladimir Ya., ǂe author.
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El Quijote universal : 150 traducciones en el IV Centenario de la muerte de Miguel de Cervantes / editado por José Manuel Lucía Megías. (OCLC #985966961)

The OCLC Bib Formats documentation says for field 041:

For works in multiple languages, the codes for the languages are recorded in the order of their predominance. If predominance cannot be determined, record the codes in English alphabetical order. If the code mul (Multiple languages) is recorded in Lang (meaning the item is multilingual with no predominant language), the code for the title (or the first title, if there are more than one) and the code mul are recorded. Alternatively, any number of specific language codes may be recorded in repeating occurrences of subfield ǂa.

The first option is used for this book:

    Lang: spa 
    041 1_ ǂa spa ǂa mul ǂh spa

So where to draw the line? How many languages are too many to list? This decision may vary by institution; for example, National Library of Medicine used the mul code for titles in more than six languages. I don’t know that my library has a limit for how many languages we will list, but with translations in 150 languages, mul seems far more reasonable!

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Basic data on depressive symptomatology, United States, 1974-75 / [Rona Beth Sayetta and David P. Johnson]. (OCLC #5833792)

To search for a Sudoc number in OCLC (like “HE 20.6209:11/216”), use the gn: index, and remove all punctuation and spacing from the number:

gn: HE20620911216

This search does return the title we’re looking for:

Vital and health statistics. Series 11, no. 216
HE 20.6209:11/216

but also this one, whose Sudoc number compresses to the same string:

NCHS CD-ROM. Series 21, no. 6.
HE 20.6209/11:21/6

This is still a useful search, to quickly get you to government document records (if they exist), but since that compression to the search string is lossy, you must confirm that any record you find this way is the correct one.

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Daniel Boone / by Reuben Gold Thwaites. (OCLC #994154857)

Here’s a fun one from our Special Collections cataloger: This volume had a publication date of 1909 on the title page, a copyright date of 1902 on the verso, but no edition statement anywhere, except next to the title’s entry on the series list in the front matter:

Daniel Boone.
By Reuben Gold Thwaites. Third Edition.

So is that usable in the record?

RDA 2.5.2.2 says that Designation of Edition may be taken from anywhere inside the piece and used unbracketed. Given the difference in years, it made sense that this would be the third edition (and didn’t make a lot of sense that they would reference that edition in the series title list if this was not it), so we included it as an edition statement:

250 __ ǂa Third edition. 
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Inventory of federal archives in the states : series IV, the Department of War. no. 14, Iowa / prepared by the Survey of Federal Archives, Division of Professional and Service Projects, Work Projects Administration ; the National Archives, cooperating sponsor. (OCLC #994006495)

Sometimes it’s helpful to get ebook metadata from the print record, like when the technician doing the digitization has covered the publication information with their hand:

264 _1 ǂa Des Moines, Iowa : ǂb Historical Records Survey Project,
    ǂc 1940.

We did not bracket the information, as the record is provider-neutral, and covers any potential complete copies as well (of whose content we can be reasonably confident).