Abbreviations

      I write to ask whether other users of EE think that section 2.56 should have a sentence to the effect that, if the listing in 2.56 does not include an abbreviation for a desired word, users should turn to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary.  (I got this suggestion from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., sect. 15.1.)  Abbreviations from many fields are given alphabetically throughout WNCD.

     For any reference work like EE to include every single abbreviation used in citing the parts of a source would turn the work into a dictionary of abbreviations.  EE is a guide, not an exhaustive encyclopedia.  Thus my suggestion.  Sometimes, it is reasonable for a guide to send readers elsewhere.  For example, the 312-page The Canadian Style sends readers who want to know how to spell a Canadian place name to 636-page Concise Gazetteer of Canada, an official government publication, and those of us who work extensively with French-Canadian records are grateful.

     Perhaps an example will help support my suggestion.  Some repositories use "register" in lieu of "book" or "volume."  Thus, the entry for Jean-Balthazar Martin's baptism in the parish register of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Port Royal, Acadie, at the web site of the Nova Scotia Archives, http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/acadian/archives.asp?ID-2111, gives the volume as "R1."  Maybe R1 makes sense for finding paper material in a government archive since that is part of the archive's scheme for organizing what it has, but R1 does not help readers know what they are dealing with, in this case, a digital image of an artifact, a book.  I wanted "register" since that is the common word for what I was citing  I found no abbreviation for "register" in EE's section 2.56.  So I turned to the CMS and got directed to the WNCD, where I found "reg." The draft of my source note reads, "The Registers of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Annapolis Royal, 1702-1755, Jean-Balthazard baptism, 13 April 1704, Reg. 1, p. 148; An Acadian Parish Remembered, Nova Scotia Archives (http://www.gov.ns.ca :  accessed 29 April 2011). I do not know just how common "register" is as a term for the documents used by genealogists, so I do not suggest adding "reg." to the list of abbreviations in 2.56.  Besides, I think that would open the door to including any and all abbreviations anyone ever used, making 2.56 unwieldy.

     Does anyone else think that EE's sect. 2.56 would be better if it contained a sentence such as I propose at the beginning of this post?  Changes to EE should reflect what multiple users think, not just one user.

     George Findlen