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Looking Forward, Looking BackEd Jones Systems Analysta

a RoweCom Information Quest, Inc., Carlsbad, CA 92008 USA .Published online: 06 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Ed Jones Systems Analyst (1999) Looking Forward, Looking Back, Serials Review, 25:4, 38-39

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38 SERIALS REVIEW Ð KAREN CARGILLE Ð

Gasaway is Director of the Law Library and Profes-sor of Law, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,NC 27599; e-mail: laura_gasaway@unc.edu.

LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK: SERIALS CATALOGING

Ed Jones

Serials cataloging in this century has been informedby a somewhat halting pragmatism, driven both by thechanging form of serials themselves and by the chang-ing form of the library catalog, though the latter hashad by far the strongest inßuence.

In the beginning, most library catalogs were inbook form, either manuscript or printed. Additions tothe catalog were inserted on slips; changes to the cat-alog were performed in manuscript. But by 1901, onthis side of the Atlantic at least, the growing use ofcheap printed cards from the Library of Congressspelled the demise of the book catalog. The rules ofentry in the Þrst collaborative catalog code of the cen-tury, the Anglo-American rules of 1908, differed forBritish and American libraries, with the former (stilldominated by book catalogs) entering serials under theearliest title, and the latter (increasingly dominated bycard catalogs) entering them under the latest title. Bothapproaches treated serials as intellectually integral worksthat might be subject over time to superÞcial changesin title but not necessarily to fundamental changes incontent. The clue to a fundamental change was discon-tinuity in numberingÑthe difference between Òcontin-ued byÓ and Òsuperseded by.Ó In practice this resultedin the unitary cataloging of serialsÑa single catalogrecord representing a single serial work, regardless ofmanifestationÑbecause reproductions and reprints(except for classic works) were comparatively rare.

While entry under the earliest title may seemstrange to us today (though we have adopted it de factoin the case of so called minor title changes), it made agreat deal of sense in the age of the book catalog whenit was much easier to add a note to an existing entrythan to change that entry to a reference and insert anew consolidated entry elsewhere in the catalog. ForAmericans entry under the latest title made similarsense in a world of entries on cards. The fullest entrycould now be given where it would be of most use:under the (latest) title that most users would be seeking.

For both earliest and latest entry cataloging, the con-solidated entry was both intellectually satisfying (be-cause it corresponded to the serial as a work) and prac-tical (fewer entries to tip into the book and fewer cardsto Þle in the drawer).

Latest entry cataloging dominated the Þrst three-quarters of the twentieth century. The 1908 Anglo-American rules were revised in 1941 and again in1949 for American libraries, but each time with latestentry cataloging intact. The increasing acquisition ofmicroform reproductions in the postwar period wastypically accommodated through a dashed-on entry onthe card for the printed serial, thereby continuing topreserve the idea of a single entry for a single work.

All this gradually came apart with the introductionof the computer, Þrst into card production, later intothe technical process of cataloging, and Þnally into theÞnished product: the catalog. The 1967 revision ofthe collaborative catalog code (AACR1) brought fortha new transatlantic semi-consensus for successiveentriesÑa new catalog record every time the titlechanged, regardless of continuity of content. (The per-sistent strength of the latest entry lobby can be judgedfrom the fact that the Library of Congress initiallyopted out of that particular provision of the new code.See footnote 12 to AACR1.) Additionally, the emerg-ing USMARC format, which now commenced its longsymbiotic relationship with the catalog code, rejectedthe dashed-on entry, requiring a separate USMARCrecord for each manifestation of a work, regardless ofidentity of content. With these two blows, the alreadyfaltering correspondence of the entry and the work forserials was effectively ended.

The switch to successive and separate entries oc-curred only towards the end of the age of card catalogs,as computers were gradually introduced to produce ormodify the requisite card sets. Besides introducing ef-Þciencies into catalog card production, online catalog-ing on a shared database enhanced the possibilities forcooperative cataloging of serials and gave birth spe-ciÞcally to the CONSER Project. In an environment ofshared cataloging, the arguments for successive entrycataloging triumphed (though latest entry was prag-matically retained for conversion of existing manualrecords). With the active participation of the Library ofCongress in CONSER in 1971, successive entry cata-loging received the imprimatur of the national biblio-graphic agency.

An additional support for successive entries camefrom the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN).A new ISSN was assigned to a serial every time its as-

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Ð THE BALANCE POINT Ð VOL. 25, NO. 4, 1999 39

sociated key title changed (i.e., successive entry). Thenational ISSN center was housed at the Library of Con-gress. Ideally the Library of Congress and the US ISSNcenter would have been able to use the same catalogrecord (in practice they did), but since the key title and theAACR catalog entry did not correspond exactly, mucheffort was (and is) put into a still unÞnished quest to har-monize AACR2 and ISSN rules for successive entries.

The adoption of AACR2 in 1981 introduced onefurther shift from traditional practice: changing thebasis of the bibliographic description from the latestissue to the earliest issue. There were many reasons fordoing this, not least to ensure some stability in the bib-liographic description (changes would be described innotes rather than in the title paragraph). But it also rep-resented a somewhat antiquarian approach, ensuringthat for currently published serials there would be anincreasing divergence between the bibliographic datain the current issue (including, in some cases, the titleproper) and the main bibliographic description in thecatalog. Since brief displays in online catalogs tendedto exclude notes (where such things as the current titleand the current publisher were stored), the conse-quences of this divergence for the user were magniÞed.

This is where we are today, at the end of the century,the dawn of the new millennium, whatever. Where arewe heading? If the past is a guide, we will hold on tosuccessive entry cataloging, possibly for another de-cade or so. After this, we may see the old correspon-dence between the catalog entry and the work restored,hopefully without any large-scale recataloging.

Two forces are working against the long term sur-vival of successive entry. On the one hand is the grow-ing migration of serial publications to the Web. Inmoving to the Web, many of these publications areshedding earlier titles when they are no longer useful.Issues published by one publisher move en masse tothe site of a new publisher while the old publisher dis-appears from the online imprint. Some current aware-ness serials are even shedding seriality in favor of a bi-furcation into current and archive (see, for example,The EconomistÕs Website at http://www.economist.com). This makes successive entry and descriptionbased on the earliest issue more difÞcult for onlinepublications, though not impossible (the notes just be-come much more arcane).

The other force working against successive entry isa philosophical shift at the international level back to-wards the concept of the work. The IFLA FunctionalRequirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR; seehttp://www.ißa.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf) describes a

hierarchical framework in which works have expres-sions that in turn have various physical manifestations,with an expectation that a coherence will persist be-tween the levels of abstraction: work, expression, man-ifestation. If one accepts that FRBR represents a newinternational consensus in the same sense that theStatement of Principles of the 1961 International Con-ference on Cataloguing Principles (which underlayAACR1) represented such a consensus, then we maysee evolving a concomitant change in the structure ofonline catalogs to accommodate the FRBR hierarchi-cal framework.1

Thus the twenty-Þrst century may see us movingforward into the past, at least in the sense of returningto older principles. For some time libraries have hadtrouble with aspects of the new orthodoxy of succes-sive and separate entries. Although successive entrieshave ultimately prevailed (aside from an experiment atNorthwestern University and the earliest entry con-vention for a gradually accreting class of minor titlechanges), separate entries for microform reproduc-tions and, latterly, online versions, have often beenabandoned by libraries in their OPACs in favor of asingle entry for the printed serial (with access to mi-croforms through a holdings record and access to on-line versions through hyperlinks generated from theMARC 21 [formerly USMARC] 856 Þeld). With ashift towards FRBR, one might expect a more intel-lectually coherent catalog record structure to super-sede these ad hoc solutions.

The library catalog is a magniÞcent structure, sur-prisingly resilient for the battering it continually re-ceives from those seeking to improve it. Nevertheless,fundamental reform of the sort suggested here needsalways to be undertaken with extreme caution. Theshift to successive and separate entries was achievedonly after extensive public debate and after numerousaftershocks in the years following adoption. Any shiftback (which might, wrongly, be seen as a repudiationof that earlier debate) will need to weather a similarprocess.

NOTES

1. See the current work of the IFLA Task Force on Guide-lines for OPAC Displays at http://www.ißa.org/VII/s13/guide/opac.htm.

Jones is Systems Analyst, RoweCom InformationQuest, Inc., Carlsbad, CA 92008; e-mail: ed@eiq.com.

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