[Web4lib] MARC strictness

[Thomale, J]

Walt, thanks for the clarification. I didn't really mean to suggest that
the MARC standard itself imposed any field length limitations (even
though that *is* basically what I said), but rather, as you pointed out,
that most systems around the time that MARC was first used imposed such
limitations, which, from your comments, sound like they really weren't
that limiting. Oh well. That's just how it was explained to me. :-)

BTW, reading back over Lars' original posting, I apologize for the
anglo-centric bent of my response. I spoke in terms of AACR2 because
that's all I know. I have no idea what cataloging rules are used in
Sweden.

Jason Thomale

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Walt.Crawford at rlg.org [mailto:Walt.Crawford at rlg.org] 
> Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 10:25 AM
> To: Thomale, J
> Cc: Lars Aronsson; web4lib at webjunction.org; 
> web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
> Subject: RE: [Web4lib] MARC strictness
> 
> I'm going to question one of J. Thomale's comments, although 
> with less than 100% confidence that I'm right (and noting 
> that most of the comments are on the money):
> 
> > Now, I wasn't even a twinkle in my father's eye when MARC and AACR 
> > came about, but, from what I understand, these cataloging 
> rules come 
> > out of the card catalog era, when you had to be very 
> concise in order 
> > to fit the pertinent metadata on a card. This conciseness 
> translated 
> > well to MARC when it was young due to strict limitations on 
> numbers of 
> > characters for subfields, fields, and records. That's why 
> you have all 
> > the abbreviations, punctuation conventions, etc.
> 
> I was working in the library field when MARC came out, 
> started working with MARC in 1973 (five years later) and 
> eventually wound up writing the first book to attempt to 
> clarify MARC for librarians and vendors (MARC for Library 
> Use, first published in 1984--admittedly 16 years after MARC 
> II first appeared in 1968).
> 
> Issues of conciseness apply to catalog cards, to some 
> extent--but MARC has never had significant limitations on 
> "numbers of characters for subfields, fields, and records." 
> The sheer variability of MARC has always been one of its 
> great strengths.
> 
> There's a 9,999-character limit on a given field (and, thus, 
> subfield--there's no special limit on subfield 
> length)--although, admittedly, many systems prior to Web 
> times probably had roughly 1,500-character limits on 
> displayable fields (because with screen-at-a-time 
> character-based displays, there's no good way to handle a 
> longer field).
> There's technically no limit on the length of a MARC record, 
> although it's necessary to use special conventions if the 
> record grows beyond 99,999 characters--but that's the length 
> of a novella, or, say, 50 to 60 screens worth of text!
> 
> ("When it was young" can have many meanings; the system I 
> refer to, now known as the RLG Union Catalog, went to a 30K 
> length limit in 1980. I know; I wrote the batch processing 
> system that enforced those limits and actually created USMARC 
> records from the internal RLINMARC structure. That 30K limit 
> was based on mainframe programming realities. The system no 
> longer has such
> limits.)
> 
> Yes, real-world systems had and still have tighter limits in 
> some cases.
> The system I've worked with had a 30K record length limit 
> (and a 12K directory length limit, for a maximum of 1,000 
> fields within a record) for a long time, and that was one of 
> the largest limits around (I don't know what WorldCat's limit 
> is now, or if there is one, but it was around 8K or 16K 
> characters for many years, I believe). None of these limits 
> really matter except for mixed collections (formerly archival 
> and manuscript control), where you may have hundreds or 
> thousands of detailed entries--unless, of course, you're 
> trying to embed the whole text into the MARC record, which is 
> a misuse of the format.
> 
> The abbreviations and punctuation conventions come from AACR 
> and ISBD. MARC (both the underlying data format standard, 
> Z39.2, and MARC21, probably the most elaborate set of 
> tag/subfield/indicator specifications) provides a way to 
> identify all the metadata--a rich combination of syntax and semantic.
> 
> Otherwise, a good set of comments.
> 
> Walt Crawford
> wcc at rlg.org, 650-691-2227
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