Betrayal at House on the Hill: Issues Faced

Issues Faced



For this record, I started with the RDA cataloging as I feel a bit more comfortable with it. The issues I had started when I reached the publisher section. The box and rulebook include the names of three companies- Avalon Hill, Wizards of the Coast, LLC, and Hasbro. Customer support and the copyrights were under Wizards of the Coast but the most prominent logo on the box was for Avalon Hill. I first decided to go with Wizards of the Coast as the publisher due to the copyright and put Hasbro as the distributer; this was not marked as such but I did not know where else to put Hasbro’s name. After some internet research, I discovered that Avalon Hill was a division of Wizards of the Coast which in turn was a subsidiary of Hasbro. I also read about the “related corporate bodies” field in RDA. Therefore, I decided to keep the publisher as Wizards of the Coast and removed Hasbro as the distributer. I put both Hasbro and Avalon hill at the end of the record under “related corporate bodies”.

I also had trouble with the content type section. I ended up putting three different content types in as the playing pieces range from cards to plastic figurines while the rule books and haunt books were text.

For the MARC record, I was surprised to see that there was no “box” option under carrier type for unmediated objects until I realized that based on the definition in RDA, box would fall under “object”. I also ended up editing the extent section for the MARC record based on an example MARC record for this item from University of North Texas (http://iii.library.unt.edu/search~S12?/o585950967/o585950967/1%2C1%2C1%2CB/marc&FF=o585950967&1%2C1%2C) to include the type of container. I knew I wanted to make sure that the words “board game” were included in one of the fields, but I wasn’t sure which one. The UNT MARC record has this designation under the 520 field, but as this item IS a board game, not a resource ABOUT board games, I did not think that was the best location for it. I ended up putting it in two sections. One was in 655 Index term-genre/ form and the other was in 380 form of work. The UNT record also categorized the game as a card game. Despite have many cards and tiles, the tiles are used to make up the board and plastic figurines move around the board. Having played the game before, I would categorize it as only a board game, not a card game. For the actual 520 0# field, I ended up putting Horror as a subject. This game is horror-themed so I thought this was a close to a subject term I could give it.

Finally, I realized why it is so important to always check the LOC names authority database when cataloging a record. For Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, the editor of the game, I was unsure whether to use Wilkes, Jennifer Clarke or Clarke Wilkes, Jennifer. As she is an editor, not a creator or author, I was a little surprised to find her in the database. However, I did see that the LOC uses Wilkes, Jennifer Clarke as the preferred name. Another issue that arose around the LOC names database was the publisher of the game, Wizards of the Coast, LLC. The LOC database has it as Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Despite it being clearly marked as an LLC on all the materials on the game, I decided to go with the LOC database and simply put a note to indicate the name variation. 

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