[yul-naco] RDA Statement of Responsibility punctuation

[Arakawa, Steven]

With RDA's addition of affiliations to the statement of responsibility the question came up during the Module 2 webinar about punctuation to clearly demarcate the responsible entities from their various affiliations within a single statement of responsibility. I haven't seen the response in writing as of yet, but it did appear that LC wanted to avoid using semicolons, even if we didn't use ISBD spacing (which isn't to say we couldn't). Some of you may remember the lengthy LCRI on ISBD punctuation & the various ways to disambiguate ISBD punctuation from punctuation introduced by the cataloger for clarification.

Anyways, Kevin Randall on the RDA list  had what seems to me a good suggestion for the situation. His example uses commas: 

"edited by J. Garland (Cambridge Carbonates UK), J.E. Neilson (University of Aberdeen, UK), S.E. Laubach (University of Texas at Austin, USA) and K.J. Whidden (USGS, USA)"

Perhaps reflecting my aging eyeballs, the distinction between a comma and a semicolon may be difficult to catch when the semicolon isn't spaced as in ISBD. Parentheses seem to me to communicate the distinction & relationship between the person and the corporate name more clearly, & we wouldn't  need to introduce the semicolon unless it was needed to separate one statement of responsibility from another as instructed by ISBD. 

Steven Arakawa
Catalog Librarian for Training & Documentation  
Catalog & Metada Services   
Sterling Memorial Library. Yale University  
P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240     
(203) 432-8286 steven.arakawa at yale.edu