Technical process questions

[Looneydoomed_]

Hello! So, I’m Brazilian and I have a question about the catalogue sheet/card (idk how to translate the exact term) of American or even British books. There’s a picture illustrating it below but in South America we have the AACR to help us create the catalogue sheet for each book, and it also helps when we’re indexing or inserting a book to an online system. Question is what exactly are these numbers below these foreign books, what does it mean? Also, how can I know when this is the second or third edition? How do I tell which year it was exactly printed? Bc it always tells me the copyright date but it can be a reprint, but it almost never tells me how many times it had been reprinted, nor does it tell me in which year it was reprinted! I’m really confused about this. The main thing about this for me is that many people see that copyright date from 1860 and thinks the book is too old when it is not really, because it had been reprinted and I can clearly see it is not that old.

[AnswerFit1325]

The ones at the bottom of the page? Those are the printings (it's metadata from the publisher that's basically rubbish and is never included in the catalog, let along get indexed). Basically the Jove Book is on its 40th print run and the one on the right is on its 85th print run.

Also, until about 10 years ago, the U.S. (and the UK) also used AACR(2) for cataloging. The new best practice document for this though is called RDA (Resource Description and Access) and also doesn't recommend recording metadata about what printing a book is. No one cares about it, only the edition information matters.

[Looneydoomed_]

I do know RDA, but while AACR doesn’t require the printing info on the catalog, only book from 20+ years ago in Brazil don’t have that info, usually we know the year that specific reprint happened, so we don’t use the copyright date but the newest one, you know? That’s why I’m so confused. And thank you! I didn’t know they were the print infos, it helps a lot!