BCC01/SMF/4

Subcommittee on MARC Formats
2001 Annual Report

Members:  Kathryn P. Glennan (Chair), Janet Bochin, Paul Cauthen, Alice LaSota, Mark Scharff, Lois Schultz, Robert Sherrane, William Walker, Paul Frank (LC Representative), Jay Weitz (OCLC Representative)

As the MLA representative, Kathy Glennan attended the MARBI/MARC Advisory Committee meetings during the ALA Midwinter and Annual meetings. At the January 2001 meetings, MARBI agreed that all narrators should be coded in field 511, clarifying that field 508 would no longer be used for this purpose. During the June meetings, MARBI approved proposals to address the coding needs associated with the implementation of “integrating resources,” including making field 260 repeatable. In addition, MARBI agreed to discontinue the practice of “stacking” 041 codes ($g engfreger will become $g eng $g fre $g ger), referred a proposal for additional 007 codes for archival sound recordings to ARSC for their input, and reviewed a discussion paper about multi-lingual authority records.

At the Subcommittee's joint open meeting in New York with the Descriptive Cataloging Subcommittee, Kathy summarized MARBI actions of particular interest to MLA and co-moderated an open question-and-answer session with Nancy Lorimer.

The Subcommittee has also considered other MARC-related issues, including possible changes to Leader/06 values for “printed” and “manuscript” music and the appropriateness of using value “s” in 008/23 (“Form of Item”) for sound recordings. MLA members continue to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo in providing authority control for the 1XX/240 combination in bibliographic records. Because MARBI soundly rejected MLA’s discussion paper which addressed one solution to this problem (DP #72, Jan. 1994), the Subcommittee will ponder alternate means to improve this situation.

The Las Vegas open meeting, held in conjunction with another BCC Subcommittee, will feature the usual review of MARBI activities and late-breaking MARC issues.

Submitted by Kathryn P. Glennan

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Last updated February 18, 2002