>>>> Bryan Baldus <bryan.baldus_at_QUALITY-BOOKS.COM> 16/11/2009
>17:43 >>>
>On Monday, November 16, 2009 11:22 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>> [ Incidentally, I can't tell you the difference between "Cookery, Indic",
>> "Cookery, Indian", and "Cookery--Indian--[place]". All appear in
>> authorities.loc.gov. LCSH is weird. Also both "Cookery, Indic--Calcutta
>> style.", as opposed to "Cookery--Indian--Calcutta". Ooh, and then we've got
>> "Cookery, Indic--India--Delhi." (authorized) AND "Cookery--India--Delhi."
>> (also authorized). Maybe someone can explain this, but not me. ]<
>
>Cookery, Indic would be cuisine of India.
>
>Cookery, Indian => Indian cookery, would be cuisine of Indians of North
>America.
>
>Cookery, Indic--Calcutta style would be Indic cuisine of the region of
>Calcutta.
>
>Cookery--India--Calcutta; Cookery--India; Cookery--India--[place] would be
>cooking etc. found in that place, regardless of the origin of the food. For
>example, a book about restaurants in Calcutta (not necessarily limited to
>Indic restaurants--so French, Italian, American, etc.).
Until I read this, I had no notion that "Cookery, Indian" might be referring to North American aboriginal cuisine, rather than that of the Indian subcontinent, but that's because in Britain we had much more to do with India. How awkward. What do you call a person from India -- an Indian, or an Indic, or something else? And it looks, from my reading of Jonathan's contribution, that he was unsure what Indian meant in this context too.
Yet another example of our nations being divided by a common language! Others I remember from LCSH sessions at library school include the Civil War (17th century or 19th century?) and things like Football and Hockey. The latter, despite the lower latitude of the United States, is apparently played predominantly on ice.
My wife, as a cataloguer at the Bodleian, helped to feed into the development of LCSH, but some of her suggestions caused difficulty. She wanted to propose a heading for Farm Shops, which in the UK signifies retail outlets attached to a farm (and often located there) selling the produce of the farm direct to the public. Unfortunately in US parlance, a Farm Shop would be a workshop, and you call retail outlets "stores". But to us, a Farm Store would be a building where you kept things (e.g. supplies or equipment) for the running of the farm. There did not appear to be the concept of a farm retail outlet in the US, so you'd have the ironic situation that the heading might end up using US terminology for a thing which does not exist in the US and which was likely to be misunderstood in the UK.
I see, looking it up, that it is still rumbling on:
150 __ |a Roadside stands [proposed]
450 __ |a Farm shops (Stores, Retail)
And the book my wife was cataloguing was definitely *not* about "roadside stands", a concept which I have never heard of before. Farmers' markets are a different thing again.
Another one she was dissatisfied with was "Dyffryn Nantlle" which she would have liked as the preferred heading for a valley in Wales which was in the Welshest bits of Wales and therefore did not even have an English name on the Ordnance Survey map. That one ended up being anglicised in LCSH as "Nantlle Valley (Wales)". Never mind. I suppose it's no worse than Loire Valley (France).
Our lecturer at library school very much emphasised to us that despite the (then recent) appearance of NT, BT, RT in the schedules that LCSH was *not* a thesaurus, that not all subdivisions could be used anywhere, and that there were lots of inconsistencies which made her hesitate to acknowledge it had any "design" as such. It's probably getting better as the years go by, and even on this side of the Atlantic most people accept it's the best we've got, and that we probably won't ever have a fully ISO 5964-compliant universal thesaurus.
Matthew
--
Matthew Phillips
Systems Librarian
Library IT Support
Library and Learning Centre, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN
Phone 01382-385181 (internal x85181)
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Received on Fri Nov 20 2009 - 07:46:02 EST