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Human Rights Watch Newsletters (Jeffrey Myers-Hayer) Ann Ercelawn 27 Sep 1994 18:09 UTC

Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 14:00:14 +0000 (GMT)
From: JEFFREY MYERS-HAYER <JMYERSHA@MAIL.LOC.GOV>
Subject: HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH NEWSLETTERS

          There has been a good deal of discussion recently concerning LC's
          cataloging of  the Human Rights Watch newsletters.  Most of these
          newsletters originated as:
                                News from <Region> Watch
          which changed to:
                            <Region> Watch
          and now to:
                       Human Rights Watch/<Region>.
          In  almost  all  cases, each  issue focuses  on  a  single topic,
          prominently stated on  the chief source.  Although LC views these
          publications  as  periodicals,  a   few  libraries  have  created
          monograph analytic  records,  based  on  the  theme  titles.   To
          preclude  LC catalogers creating  separate monograph records,  we
          decided  to  create authority records  to  note  that  these  are
          serials,  not  monograph series.   (This  is  done  on  authority
          records by coding field 008/  12  as  "z".)  Since  the titles on
          most of the authority records would be identical to  the names of
          the bodies,  the  titles  had  to  be qualified.  The  choice  of
          qualifier did not fit RI 1.6, because the title is not that of  a
          "series".  Following the guidelines in  RI 25.5B,5, we  chose  an
          appropriate element  extracted  from  the  work,  in  this  case,
          "newsletter".   This  resulted  in  authority  records  such  as:
          Americas Watch (Newsletter), and:  Human  Rights  Watch/ Americas
          (Newsletter).

           Once the authority records were established, the headings on the
          bibliographic records had to match them.  That is why each serial
          is entered under a uniform title despite the lack of a conflict.
          LC's policy office was consulted on these decisions.

          Resolving this situation by using "<Body> (Newsletter)" seems  to
          reflect both the publisher's and the users' understanding of this
          set of publications.