Sometimes months or even years pass by without any cataloging questions coming my way. Then all of a sudden there will be a rash of queries. Several came from a fellow California cataloger. Bill Nazarro at the Whittier Law School Library had to catalog a very early California compilation that brought up a question as to the appropriate date of qualifier to use in the uniform title. Naturally it would be a record that had no LC bibliographic or authority records for it, only a record in RLIN with identifier CLCL (hey that's LACLL!)

Soon after California became a state, a publisher issued a collection of laws from the first years of legislative activity. Following the instructions in LCRI at 25.15A1 for qualifiers to the uniform titles for codes for the U.S. States, a uniform titles for Laws, etc. (Compiled Statutes : date) should be added to the bibliographic record. The title identified the legislatures involved as 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1853 with a publication date of 1854. The rule says to use the "codification, reenactment, revision, etc." date as the qualifier. So which is the appropriate date? 1850 or 18501853 or 1854? When we had retrospectively cataloged the item we had just selected 1850, but Bill thought this was not that helpful to the user. Did your staff examine every work retrospectively converted? I made the time now. When examined, the prefatory material clearly explains that the work was codified in 1853 so the "codification" date is the best choice of date qualifier for this work.

As if that question weren't tough enough, then he had to get into a really murky area: reprints with different titles! While this is not specifically a legal descriptive issue, law publishers love to reprint GPO material and send them to libraries (often for a separate charge, of course). Bill had a CCH reprint of a GPO title cross his desk; it made for an interesting choice of title question:

CCH's reprint of General explanation of tax legislation passed in ... is cataloged under that "official title" (MARC tag 245 00) while the CCH title is tagged: 246 1 Joint Committee on Taxation's General explanation ... per DCLCSN9834807S. Why wasn't the official title tagged as a uniform title 130 with CCH's title tagged 245?

010    sn9834807
245 00 General explanation of tax legislation enacted
       in ... / $cprepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on
       Taxation.
246 1  $iReprint has title: $aJoint Committee on Taxation's general
       explanation of tax legislation enacted in ...
246 1  $iReprint commonly known as: $aBlue book
260    Chicago : $bCCH Inc., 300 v. ; $c23 cm.
310    Annual
580    Originally published: Washington, DC : U.S. G.P.O.,
710 1  United States.$bCongress.$bJoint Committee on Taxation.
710 2  CCH Incorporated.

More details about the publication first. The CCH work has a title page that precedes the GPO title page. CCH title page:

The GPO title page a few pages further inside reads:

The basic question is which is the chief source? 1.11A and 1.11B give us the answer. The title of the reprint should be transcribed as the title proper and the title of the original in the note area (now 246). I am not a CONSER cataloger, but there is an example in CONSER Cataloging Manual Module 17, p. 32 that may be misleading. The example there seems to make a note about the reprint title, not the original title.

The next question is whether this record needs a uniform title. 25.3B, 2) which would permit the omission of statements of responsibility that precede the title might be applied. Notice that I say "might." Uniform title use is I believe an option, not a mandate in this case. The Joint Committee on Taxation isn't Shakespeare. It is unlikely that we are going to have numerous manifestations of the same work. Although when Bender, RIA, and CCH all issue their versions of new tax laws it sometimes seems like we get hundreds of manifestations! If one used a uniform title, the record would then look something like this.

130 0  General explanation of tax legislation enacted in...
245 00 Joint Committee on Taxation's general explanation of 
       tax legislation enacted in ...
246 1  $iReprint of: $aGeneral explanation of tax legislation
       enacted in ...
246 1  $iReprint commonly known as: $aBlue book
260    Chicago : $bCCH Inc.,
300    v. ; $c23 cm.
310    Annual
580    Originally published: Washington, DC : U.S. G.P.O.,
710 1  United States.$bCongress.$bJoint Committee on Taxation.
710 2  CCH Incorporated.

Given that collocation is a desirable goal even in online catalogs, I believe I'd keep the 130.