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Standards: ISO 2709

Did you know that ISO 2709 (the standard of which MARC21 is an instance) is fairly general? It allows for:

  • tags which include letters and numbers (though they must still be of length three, like MARC21′s numeric tags)
  • up to nine indicators (MARC21 always has two)
  • subfield codes of length up to nine (MARC21 always has this length as two, as subfield codes like “ǂb” are two characters long)

The indicator count and subfield code length are encoded in every MARC record’s leader in positions 10 and 11; note that the spec says these should always be “2″ and “2″.

I revisited this standard again recently to determine why some vendor records were causing trouble; their leaders had position 11 set to “0″, indicating that the subfield code length was zero:

    01710nam a2000385 a 4500

though the record was full of subfield codes of length 2 (like ǂa).

This was easy enough to fix in batch (that leader position should always be “2″, so I just overwrote what was there) and I’ve contacted the vendor to let them know about the strangeness in their records. Hopefully they’ll be fixed on the vendor’s site before they cause any more trouble!

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Золотая книга сказок / Божена Немцова ; перевод с чешского А. Серобабина. (OCLC #959887720)

Whenever I create records in OCLC with non-Roman characters, I notice that it helpfully adds an 066 field to my record, like:

    066 __ǂc (N

In this case, the code “(N” indicates the presence of Basic Cyrillic script in the record, mostly as a signal to the user that extra processing may be required.

So why the weird code? I’d wondered this for a while, and finally looked it up. Longer blog post coming soon.

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Nachalo ochenʹ khoroshego letnego dni︠a︡ : (simfonii︠a︡) ; Otet︠s︡ i dochʹ ; Svi︠a︡zʹ ; U Kolkova zabolela ruka / Daniil Kharms ; risoval Stansilav Zhit︠s︡kiĭ. (OCLC #38698598)

This set of books is published in a case together; though it has no collective title for the set, we can still catalog the books together on one record. All titles are included in the title field, separated by semicolons (ISBD 1.1.5.2):

    245 10 ǂa Nachalo ochenʹ khoroshego letnego dni︠a︡:
        ǂb (simfonii︠a︡) ; Otet︠s︡ i dochʹ ; Svi︠a︡zʹ ; U Kolkova
        zabolela ruka / ǂc Daniil Kharms ; risoval Stansilav 
        Zhit︠s︡kiĭ.

which may only provide title access to the first title in the list. OCLC’s Bib Formats documentation for 246 clarifies that “for items including several works but lacking a collective title, field 246 is used only for titles related to the title selected as the title proper, usually the first work named in the chief source of information. Titles related to other works are recorded in field 740”:

    740 02 ǂa Otet︠s︡ i dochʹ.
    740 02 ǂa U Kolkova zabolela ruka.
    740 02 ǂa Svi︠a︡zʹ.
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Hebrew gifts are coming! Sing-a-long staff meeting?

(I kid, I kid)

We are going to all have to learn the alphabet again, though.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Oxidative stress and biomaterials / edited by Thomas Dziubla and D. Allan Butterfield. (OCLC #938383040)

We found brief copy for this title in OCLC, and upgraded it to RDA. One change we made was converting the 260 field to a pair of 264s.

The 260 field may be used to record places, dates, and parties responsible for the publication, distribution, and manufacture of the title, as well as copyright information. This field may be used in RDA records, though several elements map to the same subfields; the RDA toolkit’s MARC Bibliographic to RDA Mapping says that ǂa, ǂb are for publication and distribution information, and ǂe, ǂf are for production and manufacture information.

The 264 field may also be used to record the data above, but in a more granular/specific way: the second indicator specifies whether its 264 field is about production (0), publication (1), distribution (2), manufacture (3), or is a copyright date (4).

While upgrading records to RDA, I always convert existing 260s to 264s to record the most specific information I can while I have the piece in hand, using multiple fields if needed:

    264 _1 ǂa Amsterdam : ǂb Elsevier Academic Press, ǂc [2016]
    264 _4 ǂc ©2016
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Creating meaningful stuff : radical design / Johan van Mol and Peter Van Riet. (OCLC #959243902)

We struggled to decide on the title for this book. Is it “Create meaningful stuff”? Or “Radical design”?

Both titles are on the cover. Both are on the spine.

There is something like a title page which has “Radical Design” only, but it has no other title page features (like authors), and may just be decorative, as it is that same pattern. On the publisher web site, the page with a photo of the book says “In Radical Design, we want to contribute to this important economic transition.” Maybe they’re referring to their workshop series?

On the back of the book, reviewers call it “Create Meaningful Stuff”, and near the back, the authors say “So we come to the end of ‘Create meaningful stuff’”. I could find no evidence that Radical Design is a series with other parts.

We changed our minds a few times, but eventually settled on this:

    245 10 ǂa Create meaningful stuff : ǂb radical design /
        ǂc Johan van Mol and Peter Van Riet.

including this variant title for anyone who chose differently:

    246 30 ǂa Radical design

I’m relieved that the call number depends on the author as main entry instead of the title, so if we change our minds again, we won’t have to re-label.

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You’ve come a long way, baby : women, politics, and popular culture / edited by Lilly J. Goren. (OCLC #642464862)

I’d never considered contractions like “you’ve” to warrant assigning a variant title (RDA 2.3.6) with the contraction expanded, as has been done in this record: 

    245 00 ǂa You've come a long way, baby : ǂb women,
        politics, and popular culture / ǂc edited by Lilly 
        J. Goren.
    246 3_ ǂa You have come a long way, baby

That said, I don’t see an RDA rule encouraging variant titles for spelling out numerals or abbreviations. Maybe they are generally referenced under c, “assigned by the creator or by previous owners or custodians of the resource”.

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gogol-chrome:

I’m serving you “I’m the only cataloger not on vacation this week and all the materials are suddenly in Russian” realness. (at Lancaster, Pennsylvania)

I love seeing other people’s cataloging problems!

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The unreliable bestiary : an ark of stories about animals, our relationships with them, & the world they inhabit / Deke Weaver. (OCLC #957129744)

We got several of these DVDs in our fine arts library, parts of the Unreliable bestiary, a series of performances about endangered species and their habitats, one for each letter of the alphabet. So far, we had wolf, bear, elephant.

So how to catalog? One record per animal? All together as a set? As a serial?

We felt that not much would be gained by cataloging the pieces on individual records; our cataloger in the Fine Arts library said their patrons would be most interested in knowing about the performances as a group (and we found it less likely that researchers on wolves, bears, elephants would benefit from subject access for their particular animals), so we decided to catalog them together. As the series has a pre-determined (if far-off) ending, we don’t consider this a serial, and cataloged the works as a set.

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That’s some good metadata from UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center! (Thanks, Deirdre!)