The Ideal Copy: Fallacies in the Cataloguing of Liturgical Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OUR recent book, Cataloguing Discrepancies: the 1493 Breviary of York, at the moment in press, deals with some 40 catalogues in which is described the 1493 printing in Venice of the York breviary.1 They range from 1715 to 2005, Coates’ recent catalogue of early printed books in the Bodleian Library,2 and from the briefest of descriptions, as in the 1715 reference, to full descriptions, as in the most recent of these publications. Not one of the 40 is both complete and correct, although the first and last deal only with a single library. All except Coates are, at first glance, irrelevant to the present note, because only in Coates is the concept of the ‘ideal’ copy an issue. In Coates, the following is the structure of the entry for the Breviary of 1493: Inventory of contents, colophon, collation, references. We were informed that the inventory is of the ‘perfect’ (recte ideal) copy after at first thinking it was that of the only other extant copy, with which it is identical, but which Coates does not mention. His ‘first copy’ is the Bodleian book: his ‘second copy’ is the set of fragments in the Bodleian Library. The other complete copy, once in the church of St Helen’s, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, is now held in the Bate collection of Loughborough University Library.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".