Hal Cain asked in regard to multilingual catalogues:
>What about notes?
A Middle Eastern poster on Autocat suggested that inclusions such as
"[publisher unknown]" should be in the language of the text.
Certainly that is elegant, but a lot of work for lesser known
languages. It saved us time when ISBD's "/" replaced "[by]" or other
addition in the language of the text in 245$c. Notes in the language
of the text would certainly be equally elegant.
For a record we code 040$bfre, the notes and subject headings are in
French (6XX 2nd indicator 6 for RVM), and in a library OPAC equipped
to use that coding (as mentioned earlier) so are display constants
based on 246 2nd indicators. It would be interesting to hear what is
done in Switzerland and other bilingual countries. (It's astonishing
how many catalogues simply display 246's as "Other titles", and do not
create the notes called for.)
I've never seen a proposal that 008/35-37 or 041 to be used in the way
some Canadian libraries use 040$bfre, but like notes in the language
of the text, it would be elegant.
In Korea, I used English notes for all Western languages, and Korean
ones for all Asian languages, Romanization for all Western languages
(e.g., Russian), and Hankulization for all Asian languges (e.g,,
Chinese and Japanese).
To return to the original question of language for inclusions, Latin
abbreviations seem to me to be better than the cultural imperialism of
using English for other languages, and far less work (even if not as
elegant) than phrases in the language of the text. I'm not convinced
by patron ignorance as an argument. Surely for the poorly educated,
the meaning of common abbreviations could be included in library
orientation, and would be doing them a favour in the larger
bibliographic world. The abbreviations will not soon vanish, even if
most stop putting them in current records.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([log in to unmask])
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
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