William A Kelly
2006-08-15 18:10:29 UTC
To those of us who have had the advantage of a rigorous professional
training in librarianship, including the intricacies of various cataloguing
rules, in addition to academic work at undergraduate and postgraduate level
Bill Bell's posting presents no curiosity. Any experience with the British
Museum's cataloguing rules, as developed in the nineteenth century by
Antonio Panizzi, or the Prussian Instructions for the Alphabetical
Catalogue brings one frequently up against such headings - not authors - as
'God' or 'Old Bastard' for anonymously published titles.
I'm familiar with the point raised by Peter Hoare of finding such phrases
as 'Tomus Alter' and 'Edicion Segunda' used as author headings, as I
remember a former colleague, with whom I'm still in friendly contact,
telling me many years ago of discovering such author headings in the
catalogue of the Oxford college to which he had been appointed as the first
professionally qualified librarian. The wife of one of the Fellows, whose
training in librarianship was as slight as her familiarity with foreign
languages, had in all innocence/ignorance produced such howlers as these in
the course of cataloguing the older bookstock.
Dr. W.A. Kelly
Research Fellow
Scottish Centre for the Book
Napier University
Edinburgh
training in librarianship, including the intricacies of various cataloguing
rules, in addition to academic work at undergraduate and postgraduate level
Bill Bell's posting presents no curiosity. Any experience with the British
Museum's cataloguing rules, as developed in the nineteenth century by
Antonio Panizzi, or the Prussian Instructions for the Alphabetical
Catalogue brings one frequently up against such headings - not authors - as
'God' or 'Old Bastard' for anonymously published titles.
I'm familiar with the point raised by Peter Hoare of finding such phrases
as 'Tomus Alter' and 'Edicion Segunda' used as author headings, as I
remember a former colleague, with whom I'm still in friendly contact,
telling me many years ago of discovering such author headings in the
catalogue of the Oxford college to which he had been appointed as the first
professionally qualified librarian. The wife of one of the Fellows, whose
training in librarianship was as slight as her familiarity with foreign
languages, had in all innocence/ignorance produced such howlers as these in
the course of cataloguing the older bookstock.
Dr. W.A. Kelly
Research Fellow
Scottish Centre for the Book
Napier University
Edinburgh