BCC2004/SMF/2

Subcommittee on MARC Formats
Submitted by Paul Cauthen, Chair

The Subcommittee on MARC Formats held a joint open meeting with the Authorities Subcommittee. During the MARC portion of that meeting, the Subcommittee's work during the past year was summarized.

The Subcommittee worked with Sarah Adams of the RISM-US Office in developing a MARBI discussion paper for additions and changes to MARC21 to accommodate RISM data. The discussion paper outlined a single new field, 031, for both the bibliographic and authority formats, for the recording of musical incipits using existing alpha-numeric encoding systems, such as Plaine & Easie Code. Paul presented the discussion paper at the January 2004 MARBI meetings at ALA Midwinter. The discussion paper was well-received and is expected to be presented as a full proposal at the June 2004 MARBI meeting in Orlando.

The Subcommittee reviewed some of the problems associated with the 028 field, in particular, the indexing difficulties resulting from the use of the double-dash to indicate a range of consecutive manufacturer’s numbers. Although OCLC has implemented a limited indexing of this formulation, most online systems have not. Since this field already has a troubled history with MARBI, and, since the MARC documentation does not normally include indexing instructions, the Subcommittee concluded that a solution to the indexing problem is not likely to be achieved through changes in the format.

The Subcommittee began to explore ways to make MARC21 authority records more useful as tools for machine authority processing by adding information to records which indicates more specifically the type of heading represented.

The meeting concluded with a presentation by Mickey Koth and Jim Zychowicz on the web version of the Music Cataloging Bulletin.

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Last updated March 14, 2004