I too am enjoying the conversation here, and have felt able to postpone
setting AUTOCAT to "mail" after returning from ALA; there are more than
enough ideas floating in this forum.
I fall on the side of going with the proposal, but my purpose in posting
is to respond to Jimmie Lundgren's proposal that birth dates be
presented without trailing hyphen or prefatory "b.". Since we seem to
agree that catalog users regard qualifiers as sources of information,
and not merely devices to differentiate entries in an index (even if
some of us don't like it), we should use a convention that invites no
confusion about the nature of the information being presented. It seems
that users clearly understand a date following a name, and followed by a
hyphen, to be a birth date. A prefatory "b." can do the same, though I
don't like it because of the filing problems others have mentioned. A
single unpunctuated date after a name, however, might suggest a
publication date to a catalog user accustomed to seeing citations in
articles such as (Buzzard, 1966) or (J. Crow, 1998). Any change in the
way we present dates must not create ambiguity.
Mark Scharff, Music Cataloger
Gaylord Music Library
Washington University in St. Louis
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