Policy

Introduction

Mass-market toys and collectibles are an ever-increasing part of public imagination and popular culture. Whether or not mass-produced toys will stand the test of time as cultural artifacts remains to be seen, but as individual items have aged and increased in scarcity collectors, historians, and dealers of these items have increased in number and legitimacy while the monetary values for these items as collectors’ pieces has in some cases skyrocketed. However, the mass-market status of these items proves to be a complicating factor in their identification, classification, and evaluation for four reasons: 1) what collectors will value and recognize as meaningful variation is unpredictable 2) what collectors value and recognize as meaningful variation is subject to change 3) toy manufacturers have not historically included unique identifying information to differentiate variations 4) toy manufacturers have been historically unreliable in documenting what was and was not produced during the life of a toy line.

This convergence of value, confusion, and increasing demand means:

1. Collectors are beginning to amass museum-quality personal collections
2. Unscrupulous dealers are willing to create and sell forgeries
3. There is is always a chance to discover new legitimate variations of a product

We have created this cataloging policy with the hope that it can serve as way to standardize and disambiguate how these items are described, with the resultant database of records presenting itself as a research tool for collectors and as an inventory and recall tool for — luck willing — museums and libraries in the future.

Cataloging Policy

The following cataloging policy is designed to create records in MARC and RDA. During the development of this policy, we selected fields with the following assumptions in mind:

1. An item is the sum of itself (the main figure), its packaging, and its accessories
2. An accessory is anything within the packaging not permanently attached to the largest contents (e.g. pamphlets, soft goods clothing, weapons, smaller figures)
3. An item should be cataloged as-is (e.g., items no longer in packaging should not include information for packaging in their record, items missing accessories should not have those accessories reflected in their record)
4. Variations in packaging should be noted
5. Variations in accessories should be noted
6. Variations in item itself (the main figure) (e.g. color, sculpt, articulation) should be noted
7. Any combination of variation in packaging and accessories is considered a unique manifestation
8. Variations in item itself (main figure) may constitute a unique manifestation, if and only if it has been recognized and evaluated as meaningfully different by subject experts

[As a result this is highly subject to cataloger knowledge and may be the least consistently applied guideline for this policy. The issue of capturing variation in the item itself (main figure) is addressed within the fields selected for model records. ]

What follows is a sample record schema, with RDA noted on the left and MARC on the right. Explanations of field usage per this policy are in standard text. Example values are in italics. Catalogers should follow RDA and MARC guidelines for all fields unless otherwise noted. Required fields are orange, while optional fields are white. Some MARC fields have no defined RDA analog and are not included on the left of the table.