Spelling It Out For Us

Catalogablog reports that the Library of Congress is contemplating a change in listings from the abbreviation "Dept." to the fully spelled "Department."

This is a big job:

OCLC has agreed to change the approximately 48,000 1XX fields in name authority records, and the Library of Congress would change its approximately 200,000 bibliographic records and re-distribute them, beginnning no earlier than March 2, 2011.

The Library of Congress invites comments on the proposal. It sounds fine to me.

I like things spelled out. I'm horribly inefficient with text messaging, because I insist on using full words and punctuation, rather than the many amusing abbreviations that are featured in all the commercials.

That's bad for limited-character situations, and obviously for catalog cards in the old days, but if you have the room, I'm all for writing out words.

Do it, LC! Do it!

That's just my take.

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