Editorial Guidelines

From WikiThing

The following are basic guidelines to be used for Libraries of Early America collections. This is designed to supplement the Cataloging Guide for general Legacy Libraries, which should serve as a jumping-off point. Drafted by Jeremy B. Dibbell, November 2008.

[edit] Editions

1. Where the specific edition is known, it should be added (either using a library record or manually). Often the specific edition can be determined using WorldCat or ESTC if certain bibliographic elements are present in the listing (publication place, date, format, number of volumes, &c.).

2. Where the specific edition is not known, that should be noted in the Comments field through the use of the phrase "Precise edition unknown." Using WorldCat or ESTC, it may be possible to narrow down the potential editions to just a few, in which case a comment can be made to that effect (i.e. "Three London editions of this title were published, in 1776, 1787 and 1793"). The LT record should not include imprint or date information unless the specific edition can be determined.

3. Where the work itself is not known (i.e. an entry which just reads "Xenophon"), the record should be added to LT manually, and given a title in brackets (i.e. [Xenophon]) with notes in the Comments field providing what we know about the work and giving any possible indications of specific titles, &c.

[edit] Titles

Where the title is less than 400 characters long, no action need be taken. Where the title exceed 400 characters, it will be truncated in the Title field. This can be corrected by copying and pasting the entire title into the Summary field (which combines Title, Author and Date). Usually when this happens I add an ellipses at the end of the Title field to indicate truncation.

[edit] Imprint & Date

When importing from libraries, the imprint information and date are often jumbled and/or truncated. This should be corrected where possible. Also, publication dates which extend across multiple years (i.e. 1787-89) tend to not display correctly (usually just one year will show up in the Date and Summary fields), so this should be manually corrected.

[edit] Comments

The Comments field is the useful, catch-all field for LEA data. Things that might be included here:

• Short title as given in the source catalog(s).
• Price paid or asked.
• Location of extant copy and other provenance information.
• Links to digitized/transcribed catalog page(s), marginalia, digital copies of the book.
• Notes on bookplates, marginalia, acquisition information, &c.

[edit] Tags

Depending on how the source catalog is organized, tags might be drawn from there or might be developed during the LT-cataloging process. This will be highly individualized, and will depend on the specific nature of each collection. Please capitalize each main word of the tag (i.e. British History, not British history or british history).