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The Collation

Knowing your Adams from your Adams: decoding library catalog citations

Picture, if you will, a 16th-century Continental edition of Ovid, an 18th-century illustrated history of London, and a 19th-century book about the American west. Now picture which one of the three might be “in Adams.” Which one did you pick? Years ago, when I was doing dissertation research at the British Library Map Library, everyone in my circle knew that “Adams” referred to the standard bibliography of London topographical books published between 1604 and 1851. It was disorienting to discover later that people working with Continental 16th-century publications had their own “Adams,” as did people working with Americana.

In other words, it’s trick question: all three could be “in Adams,” and as long as you’re talking with other specialists, everyone would know which Adams you mean by context. Traditionally, library catalogs assume that everyone is a specialist, and that a description needs to fit on a 3 x 5 inch card. That’s how we ended up with online catalog citations like these ones: 

  1. It’s actually slightly more complicated: contributors to the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), which later became the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), worked from a competing list of standard forms, so many library catalogs have a mix of entries.
  2. MARC stands for MAchine Readable Cataloging, a data encoding standard created in the 1960s—when it was amazing—but which has remained structurally the same ever since. A replacement encoding standard is now in development, but is still a long way away, for practical purposes.

Comments

How about your Smith from your Smith? This entry refers to the wrong W. H. Smith.

http://hamnet.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=Smith%2C%20W.%20H.%20%28William%20Henry%29%2C%201806-1872&Search_Code=NAME_&CNT=10&PID=8uERox2WHu2dvZoYmCI_7RxZTOn&BROWSE=2&HC=1&SID=3

Tom Reedy — February 24, 2015

Thanks! But could you give me some more clues? The link in your comment goes to four records for the actor, stage manager, and playwright W.H. Smith, author of The Drunkard, and the heading in those four records is “Smith, W. H. (William Henry), 1806-1872.” According to the full name authority record (http://lccn.loc.gov/n83057213) the heading is for the correct W.H. Smith.

Erin Blake — February 24, 2015

Sorry. The second one, “Smith, W. H. (William Henry), 1825-1891, correspondent.” That Smith is the English bookseller, politician, and Lord of the Admiralty. For that particular entry it should be the fourth one, “Smith, W. H. (William Henry), fl. 1856-1880”, author of *Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakspeare’s Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere* (1856). See https://archive.org/stream/n02journal00bacouoft#page/50/mode/2up.

Tom Reedy — February 24, 2015

Aha! Thanks. We’ll get that fixed up.

Erin Blake — February 24, 2015

You’re perfectly welcome to delete these posts; I just couldn’t find your email, or maybe I overlooked it.

Tom Reedy — February 24, 2015