Re: Are MARC subfields really useful ?

On Jun 4, 2010, at 9:24 AM, Houghton,Andrew wrote:

>> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
>> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Dan Matei
>> Sent: Friday, June 04, 2010 09:46 AM
>> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Are MARC subfields really useful ?
>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
>>> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Demian Katz
>>> Sent: 4 iunie 2010 15:27
>>> 
>>> 
>>> VuFind also uses subfields to help with relevance ranking --
>>> for example, words within subfield a of a title are given
>>> more importance than words in the rest of the field --
>>> extremely valuable if, for example, you're trying to find a
>>> book ABOUT an author rather than a book BY that author.
>> 
>> 
>> Right ! But that can be "reduced" to: a) before "/" b) after "/"
> 
> Yes it can, but the issue with MARC is that it mixes content and 
> presentation and you are suggesting a presentation position rather 
> than a content position.  The unfortunate part of MARC is that it 
> doesn't use *enough* subfields to describe the content and what 
> subfields it does define it includes presentation artifacts that 
> have to be striped or replaced depending upon what you want to do 
> with the data.
[snip]

Further, parsing ISBD correctly without subfields is fairly complicated and error-prone, and in some cases perhaps impossible to do reliably.  And for those of us have a large number pre-ISBD records, something of a sucker's game.  Much easier and more reliable to go from subfields without presentation artifacts to the desired presentation.

One example of the re-use problem that Andrew brings up is reformatting records for citation formats.  Most of the punctuation needs to change, like that extra ISBD space before the colon when designating a subfield, " : " .  (And these details are important our users.)  MODS isn't a radical rethinking of bibliographic records, but gets points for greatly improving the ease of reusing catalog records in non-catalog contexts just by keeping the ISBD punctuation out of the data.

-Tod

Tod Olson <tod_at_uchicago.edu>
Systems Librarian
University of Chicago Library