[Web4lib] MARC strictness

[Walter Lewis]

Walt.Crawford at rlg.org wrote:

>Just quick notes...
>
>Relating to another posting: ISBD punctuation has been the bane of people
>handling MARC records for a very long time; you have to design display
>rules to stay out of its way, which sometimes interferes with making data
>look right. I remember the justification for ISBD punctuation being "so you
>could determine the bibliographic elements when the cataloging is in a
>language you don't read"--you know, because there's always a
>space-semicolon-space after this element, etc. That always struck me as a
>vaguely improbable scenario: "I don't know what language that book is in,
>but there's the statement of responsibility!" (But hey, I'm definitely not
>a cataloger.)
>  
>
I had heard the "so you could OCR the catalogue card" version. 

>As for "us all" using templates and/or having multiple people to design
>MARC displays: Generalizations are usually tricky. The display
>specifications for Eureka databases (including the RLG Union Catalog) have
>always been based directly on MARC fields, subfields, and indicators; we
>certainly don't have the luxury of "normalizing" those records in any
>organized manner (since the database is being updated daily); and the
>personpower available to write that spec has never been more than part of
>one person (me), with review and occasional assistance from a variety of
>others. [snip]
>
I could from the school (perhaps a very small school) that thinks that 
when you extract a 245a (with or without normalizing the gratuitous 
punctuation) and put it in a specific spot on a screen (green screen or 
browser) you are using a template for the content placement. Perhaps it 
appears next to a friendly ( ... or more succinct, marc-oriented) label 
placed there  by the same templating rules. In short, if it is not in 
marc communications format, that glorious single string with its offsets 
etc., it has probably passed through some template (your specs, being an 
example) for human display.  That most of us sigh deeply and display the 
embedded punctuation, however arcane, mostly reflects the dead hand of 
AACR et al. and the cost of fixing thirty years of confusing punctuation 
with sub-fields indicators.

Twenty plus years ago I simply learned enough of the rules to get my 
degree (along with a promise to never take money for cataloguing).  For 
my sins, I just supervise catalogues and cataloguers as well as do other 
library web stuff. In the last few years, I have *frequently* found 
opportunities to repurpose bibliographic information that *could* be 
extracted from a marc record but which brings with it a legacy of unique 
bits of stuff that doesn't map into other (perhaps equally arcane) 
citation formats.

An example: could we not separate last name and first name in the 1xx 
and 7xx fields so that they can be placed in a user preferred order and 
not only in the AACR ordained pattern? We have 2000+ subfields and one 
of them can't be first name? 
    My excuse for getting that off my chest here?  I want to express 
marc records in a variety of ways within and beyond the library 
website.  ISBD routinely gets in my way. Occasionally so do other marc 
rules.

Walter Lewis
Halton Hills
(the guy no one would confuse with Walt Crawford)