Originally Posted on January 9, 2010 at http://mashedlibrary.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-pinzochera-ancient-books.
In the last week I have applied for a post of cataloguer of ancient books and for another one of "project manager data governance". Although their job descriptions use complete different language and they refer to different set of rules, standards, practices, I see they share many similarities and I would like to have the time for writing a sort of... mapping between the two.
Anyway, here are some notes... just for fun, with regard to one aspect of the data governance game: the transparency about the process.
I am searching for bibliographic information about La Pinzochera through different catalogues.
First of all, The European Library at http://search.theeuropeanlibrary.org.
La Pinzochera is a comedy by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Francesco_Grazzini. It happened to be published in 1582 appresso Bernardo Giunti e fratelli, in Venice.
According to the Italian SBN Catalog, The British Library Catalog and the Russian State Library Electronic Catalogue, this edition of the comedy has 48 non numbered leaves and it's an 8o (ottavo). Funny enough, probably what it has to be considered as an exemplar of the same edition has been catalogued as a 16o (sedicesimo) at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France - where they can print your own copy on demand by the way... so that you can guess yourself if La Grandeur is right or wrong :)
What I like from the Russian record is that it is clearly stating that this bibliographic entry is referring to a single work (and not to a work in a collection). This is a sort of apparently very dull information for many end-users but it is on the grounds of these data that experts can detect counterfeit editions, obtain information about the provenience and the use of a book and other information. On the contrary the Dublin Core dcterms:audience indicating that La Pinzochera is for a general audience appears a bit hilarious. The title say in fact the comedy has been printed and then... never played ("stampata la prima volta e non recitata mai"). Not... so generally enjoyed after all.
There are about 11 exemplars of the same book recorded in the Italian SBN Catalog: they share the same descriptive data including the same fingerprint - this is a sort of ISBN for ancient books that it has been considered "experimental solution" in the librarians' world since 1968. Nevertheless it has been particularly successful in Italy.
So just for curiosity, I took the fingerprint from the British Library exemplar and I went to compare the data. Of course, I would have liked to say: hey, look, this copy is different!
In fact my fingerprint is
a.o. o.i. o.a. pule (C) 1582 (R)
whereas the fingerprint taken from the other 11 exemplars recorded in the SBN italian catalog is
a.o. o.i. o.n- pule (3) 1582 (R).
Unfortunately, the difference is likely to be due to the fact that even when the book has no pagination, the cataloguers may have taken the fingerprint's 3rd group from the page that should have been numbered 13 (according to the formal rules they should have used the 4th recto after the one used for the 2nd group instead).
This is what usually happens. The differences between theory and practice in cataloguing are enormous as well as in any IT project and software development case! what people plan to do is different from what they actually do (and there is also something ...lost in translation in the 1984 Fingerprint Manual among the English, the French and the Italian version).
So I went to check another catalogue, EDIT16, the Census of italian editions printed in the XVI Century. Here we can spot that at least two different editions of La Pinzochera printed in the same year exist:
1) one edition may be the 5th part of a collection of 6 Grazzini's Comedies, with fingerprint a.o. o.i. o.n- pule (3) 1582 (R)
2) another edition is a single work, with fingerprint a:t. o.o. o.n- pule (3) 1582 (R).
Luckily, there is a digital version of one copy of the single edition, made available from one library. This has numbered pages and the fingerprint seems to be different from the one recorded in both cases within EDIT16 Census.
So, all in all, I can say that the British Library edition of La Pinzochera is different. Does it matter?