Alexander Johannesen wrote:
|On 8/23/07, Gaudet, Dodie <dgaudet_at_cmrls.org> wrote:
|> Just a reminder that those slashes, brackets, etc. have nothing to do
|> with MARC. That is ISBD punctuation found in AACR2. MARC and AACR2
|> are two separate things, although they are used together.
|
|I think it has been argued quite strongly on this list that they are
|not separate even though they technically may be so, but that's
|pedantically arguing that porridge really is milk and grain and that
|they're two separate things.
MARC (like any other metadata scheme) is a carrier for AACR2 content.
It's like nearly any audiovisual item: there's content, and there's a
carrier--and, from a cataloging standpoint, they have always been
considered as two separate aspects, even though they they may conjoin in
any given item. The content is always the important thing, and that's
what's cataloged, merely noting the particular carrier (or format).
ISBD punctuation is data subfielding or delimiting for the eyes, whereas
MARC tagging or subfielding is delimiting for automation. ISBD
punctuation is defined as being *prefixed* to data content to designate
what the *succeeding* content is (just like MARC delimiters).
Unfortunately, since this punctuation at the beginning of data gets in
the way of indexing, it was mandated by MARC leadership to be
transcribed by catalogers as a *suffix* in the *preceding* subfield
(bassackwards if I ever saw it!) or, in certain cases, omitted
altogether. ISBD was developed for the visual display of cataloging
data and for data content determination and, therefore, in my opinion,
is "un-usefully" redundant in a MARC system, since it's trying to do the
same thing that MARC indicators and delimiters already do--only screwed
up by MARC leadership 30 years ago. It now serves virtually no useful
bibliographic function in an online record; like the human appendix,
it's just there, taking up space (with all sorts of fine points about
how you have to enter the punctuation just right), and that's about all
you can say about it. Tongue in cheek, generations of catalogers have
had to do unnecessary work, creating millions and millions of ISBD
punctuation marks, just so computers didn't have to! In nearly all
cases, ISBD punctuation can be algorithmically machine-generated on the
fly from the existing MARC subfielded content for purposes of displayed
or printed output. (In the few cases where there's a problem, I'm of
the opinion that small changes or enhancements to MARC itself would
resolve them.) I've argued the non-need of ISBD in MARC records
repeatedly in cataloging forums to no avail. Oh, well...
Harvey
--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Thu Aug 23 2007 - 18:44:37 EDT