CORPORATE AUTHORS AND THE CATALOGUING OF OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026244 |
| Date | 01 March 1957 |
| Published date | 01 March 1957 |
| Pages | 132-146 |
| Author | YVONNE RUYSSEN,SUZANNE HONORÉ,ELIZABETH FUDAKOWSKA |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
CORPORATE AUTHORS AND THE
CATALOGUING OF OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS1
by YVONNE RUYSSEN
Service technique de la Direction des bibliothèques de France
and SUZANNE HONORÉ
Service des publications officielles de la Bibliothèque Nationale
Translated by ELIZABETH FUDAKOWSKA
Assistant Librarian, British Library of Political and Economic Science
UNTIL recent years in French libraries works emanating from or sponsored
by a corporate body were considered anonymous and catalogued as such.
And yet, how many librarians working in research libraries could have felt
entirely satisfied with this method? Who has not heard readers' complaints
and criticisms on the subject? How many of us have not attempted to remedy
this by more or less empirical solutions? For works of this kind, indeed, the
strict rule of entering anonymous works under the first word of the title often
appeared absurd and liable to prevent the reader from finding them. How
could a research worker find in the alphabetical author and title catalogue of a
university library a given collective publication issued by a research laboratory
well known to specialists, if the title-page of the publication happened to
begin with neither the name of the laboratory, nor with the title of the
treatise or report in question?
But it is particularly in the sphere of official publications that one can see
the deficiencies of an entirely arbitrary method which in practice, when
applied automatically, led to nothing but incoherence and confusion in the
author and title catalogue.
In the hope of achieving greater precision and no doubt also to compensate
for the arbitrary character of the rule of the 'first word of the title', it was
customary, on the other hand, to treat exceptionally as not being anonymous
any work which featured the name of the editor or the author of the report,
whoever he might be, in its title. The practice only aggravated an already
confused position.
Some examples2 will help to bring out, better than any explanation,
the chief disadvantages of this system, of entering under the first word of
the title and giving priority to the name of a person falsely considered as
author.
1 Translated by permission from Bulletin des bibliothèques de
France,
1re année, no. 2, pp. 85-
101 (février, 1956).
2 These examples have been provided by the Service des publications officielles of the
Bibliothèque Nationale.
132
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