What is "Location"?

General
21

It’s what is commonly printed on the book. Besides the title and the author(s), the title page often has three other things: Publisher name, city, year.

For example the first edition of Farmer Giles of Ham states:

London MCMXLIX
George Allen and Unwin Ltd

I’m surprised that “as on release” is suddenly a strange concept. :wink:

I only know that the standard is really old. It already exists in the 1876 rules by Charles A. Cutter, and is probably even older than that.

Back in the days editions and publishers were in general smaller and a lot more local than they are now; especially smaller publishers didn’t distribute their books to the whole country (some of them still don’t). So the intended “market” could have been just the town.

The editions originating from different cities can have differences, including differences in printing and paper quality, binding, and contents. As you can imagine, this meant that the location used to be quite important when it came down to differentiating editions.

That said, I’m not sure how important the location is now, considering other identifiers exist, but the practice to catalog it still seems to persist. And we are not limiting the contents of the site to just modern books by big publishers, right?

While I’d prefer not to reinvent the wheel, I wouldn’t be opposed to having an additional field or two. I’d even add Printing Location to the list.

Tbh, Discogs could use more than the Country field too (“Manufactured in”, etc.), to cover locations that are actually printed on the releases.

22

If it was “as on release” it wouldn’t be only part of it, now, would it. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

23

I guess I don’t understand what you mean by “only part of it”, then. Because if the book has London on the title page, you enter London. Why is that “only part of it”? Could you elaborate, help me to understand?

24

Indeed.

When you say “if it says ‘London’ on the title page, you put ‘London’” that’s nice and clear and simple. However, the vast majority of books I’ve been adding do not say “London” on the title page, or anything other than title, author, illustrator and an illustration on the title page. The copyright page, which is the only place with publisher addresses does not say “London”. They say things like

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 382
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

where “London” doesn’t quite match the description “as on release”, since “London” is only a very small part of what’s “as on release”. Perhaps now it’s clear why picking only “London” out of that lot seems so arbitrary and useless.

25

If I might add:
the Printed in Country is a standard credit (AFAIK for some tax related reasons) on the majority of editions. But as of now, we don’t have a field to add that other than the notes.
The location of the publisher though, as of today what is supposed to be the “Location” is already estabablished through the publisher’s credit, except for multiple office publishers like in the example @xceque gave. Plus, for whatever reason, many publishers don’t put their location on the title page anymore, you’d have to go to the copyright page.
I do have just found one in my collection that did and it says “Hamburg/Wien” (Hamburg [Germany] / Vienna [Austria]), that’s quite “a” location.

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26

To clarify again (and I hope not to have to keep clarifying this), I have no objection to recording this information. I have (as previously stated) no objection to following the process laid out by @auboisdormant in obtaining this information. I have no objections at all.

I merely want to know why.

What is the information being recorded? In order to extract the correct value from a spread of ambiguous potential values, I need to understand what the information being recorded is.

I also have a strong dislike (bordering on intolerance :smiley:) of rules that exist just for the sake of it. “We’ve always done it this way” is a poor reason for continuing to do something. I just want to understand why.

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27

That is true, and even the library standards acknowledge this. The title page is just the preferred/primary source. We could also have a preferred order of sources, something like:

Title page, colophon, copyright page, the rest of the resource

(That is just a very simplified suggestion for books. The database also includes magazines, sheet music, and some other types of publications, and they need to be looked at separately.)

Ah. I was just trying to explain why the city alone was initially chosen. You know, publishers print the city, cataloguers write down the city “as on release”. There were not that many identifiers to choose from (city, publisher name, year), to assist with differentiating editions.

But, modern books by big publishers, books by smaller publishers, and older books are slightly different beasts. A method for each example just needs to be agreed on.

Yeah. And because (for example) a US book can be printed in Italy, and the printing location can differ between editions and printings, it would be nice to have a dedicated field.