I support the full deprecation of the critique/review terms, but don't agree with deprecating digest.
In my understanding of the conventional definitions of digest and abridgement,
- A digest summarizes and organizes multiple things, which provides multiple perspectives or examples of a topic. The organization piece is important; entries in a digest are often selected based on some commonality, and the entries may be grouped further into categories.
- An abridgement is a shortened version of one thing.
From a reader's point of view, I think the difference in use cases between digest and abridgement is meaningful. Hypothetically, someone who is researching a topic would be interested in digests to get a range of perspectives about the topic, but would not necessarily be interested in abridgements.
Unfortunately, I don't have any usage statistics or studies about whether readers distinguish between digest and abridgment; my opinion is based only on my understanding of what the terms mean in conventional use and me experience as a researcher.
My suggestion is to keep the digest terms and revise the RDA definition of digest to highlight the difference between it and abridgement.
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Thumy Webb
Original Cataloging Librarian
Rice University, Houston TX
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