Questioning

After making and unintentional and avoidable mess of the RAP sheet claims yesterday, I came in this morning determined to make less silly mistakes. Unfortunately, that only lasted for about thirty minutes. Nevertheless! I have decided today to keep a list of all the questions I am asking myself as I'm cataloguing, and hopefully this will lead to me writing down and therefore remembering the answers.

• Ok, so, if you write the foreword to a book, do you get to have a 700 field?
• What about if someone has the last name 'd Chand' and you want to make a cutter?
• Complicated cover titles! What to include? Where to include it? Me oh my.
• When there are two authors and their from the same family, can you just write 'Blah and Blahrina Jones?' Or do you separate the names?
• What if a book's copyright date is a year later than it's publication date? How could that be?!
• I know I made it sound like I knew all about breaking down Deweys if they are too long, but you see, I don't. Not a single thing about it. Deweys and me are still less than friendly. In fact, you could say we're acquaintances who avoid each other at all possible opportunities.

Some answers:

• The Manual says: "Treat names containing the prefix 'de' as they appear in the main entry and ignore capitalisation." So I was right on that one.
• I checked out an earlier book I did with two authors from the same family, and I did separate the names (and no one made a fuss), so I'm going to go with that (even the AACR manual was stumped on that) .
• Looking at the AACR, it seems like a foreword contributor would get a 700 field. But we'll see how we go.

More manual fun:

• Section 6.9 of the procedures manual has some information about conference material - it sounds like I don't need to claim it. It also goes into the criteria conference proceedings need to satisfy to be taken in as a serial.
• Omg! Plates are supposed to be listed in the a subfield in 300! Not in the b! I'm pretty sure I've been doing it wrong...So it should look like: '247 p., [12] p. of plates.' I think.
• The 530 field can be used in a similar way to the 856 page to record where you can get online access to the item.

I think that's about all the thinking I can do for today. Time to check my books again and head on out of here!