How I Know I Learned Something This Semester

The other day I went to the library to pick up a book that was on hold and to also do a little browsing. I found a book on container gardening. On the cover of the book is a little bubble with the words "All New Edition" in it. All I could think about when I saw that was:

Should I consider that an official edition statement if I were cataloging the book. I mean it does say something about the edition, but doesn't really seem like one of the standard edition statements (like 2nd Ed. or 4th Ed.). Would I put that in the 250 field for MARC, or is that really something that would be better as a quoted note in the 5XX area? hmm... I wonder... let me check the CIP to see what they did, oh wait, there's no CIP in the book... great that means I'm actually going to have to look it up in WorldCat or LC's catalog (since i can't view the MARC record in the public library's OPAC.

Turns out, the Library of Congress does this. The 250 field says "1st ed." even though it doesn't say that any where on the book (which is really weird), and there is a quoted note in the 500 field that says "All New Edition" --Cover.

Though I dont know how it can be an all new edition and the 1st edition... but I guess if it's the first edition, everything about it can be considered "all new."

And that's how I realized (yet again) that I'm a big nerd.

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