Re: [ARSCLIST] quotation marks in lists?

["Marie O'Connell" <azile50@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Trey

According to Wikipedia -
Titles of artistic works

Quotation marks, rather than italics, are generally used for the titles of
shorter works. Whether these are single or double is again a matter of
style:

  - Short fiction, poetry, etc.: Arthur C.
Clarke<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke>'s
  "The Sentinel"
  - Book chapters: The first chapter of 3001: The Final Odyssey is
  "Comet Cowboy"
  - Articles in books, magazines, journals, etc.: "Extra-Terrestrial
  Relays," *Wireless World,* October 1945
  - Album tracks, singles, etc.: David
Bowie<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie>'s
  "Space Oddity <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Oddity>"

I have used this style in the descriptive field of database's.  If you are
fortunate enough to have a Title field, don't use them, just put in the
Title, usually using Caps for the beginning of each word.

Something to cheer you up though, before you launch into the "fix-it" stage
-
I have worked with several databases at different institutions, but there is
one which clearly got me perplexed and then made me laugh. (I shall not name
the institution!).  Whilst going through the Keyword field I found many
entries like so -  " " ";  "  "   "  ".

First of all I wondered what the heck I had come across, perhaps some new
language from an alien encounter, almost like morse code.  I soon realised
that the person inputting the data had no comprehension of what a Keyword
was, but at the beginning it could have been, for example, Public Schools.
So, for every entry after the initial one they had used " ", in other words
- ditto!  It made it extremely difficult to trace it back to the original
word it was intended for as the quotation marks, or ditto marks, constantly
changed, sometimes with 8 in a string that would have random spaces between
them with no consistency.  It took a bit of fixing and was a good brain
twister!

Good luck with the task at hand!

Cheers
Kiwi


On 7/13/07, Trey Bunn <treybunn2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Here's an odd one for you.
>
> I've completed a finding aid at the archives where I work, and it
> references 24 reel tapes of field recordings of fiddler players.  For
> each tape, I've done a track listing, a small excerpt of which looks
> like this:
>
> 1. Little Lucy
> 2. Gathering Flowers from the Hillside
> 3. Allgood Special
>
> ...and so on.  However, my supervisor wants me to redo the track
> listings with quotation marks around the song titles.  I can't recall
> ever seeing a track listing done with quotation marks, and this just
> seems wrong.
>
> 1. "Little Lucy"
> 2. "Gathering Flowers from the Hillside"
> 3. "Allgood Special"
>
> I don't have my Little Brown Handbook handy, but I've usually got very
> good grammar instincts, and that list just looks wrong to me.  I know
> some of you have worked on discographies before, so I thought I'd
> check for some opinions on the listserv.  Of course, it could just be
> company policy where I work to do finding aids like this, that is,
> with awkward-looking quotation marks on song titles, but it might have
> been helpful had I been told that thirteen pages ago.
>
> Anyway, any thoughts?
>
>
> Trey Bunn