Years (decades) ago, in their infinite wisdom, the directors of the CARL libraries (that is, those libraries that owned and had paid for the development of the CARL system), decided that fixed fields were a waste of storage space (back when storage space was a significant issue), and so they stripped them out of all records as they were added or loaded, and "saved" them offline in case they might ever be needed. And so they were called "saved fields".
Well, time passed (not much time, really) and it became obvious that the fixed fields contained data that would enable computer programming to enhance retrieval by doing such things as limiting searches by pertinent variables, utilizing short, uniform, predictably located bits of data.
And so, it was decided that the fixed fields would no longer be stripped, and that the "saved fields" would be re-attached to the records they belonged to. But, as it turned out, only about half of the saved fields could be matched successfully to the parent records. And CARL libraries spent lots of money and lots of years adding critical fixed fields BACK onto the records that once had had them.
It was a nightmare. And an argument for not letting directors make decisions among themselves when those decisions have to do with integrity or usefulness of data.
Just a little detour down memory lane ......
And Karen, does my memory fail me, or haven't there already been (relatively) recent studies about the utility of MARC fields? Admittedly it's a moving target, as systems and expectations evolve.
Janet Swan Hill, Professor
Associate Director for Technical Services
University of Colorado Libraries, CB184
Boulder, CO 80309
janet.hill_at_colorado.edu
*****
Tradition is the handing-on of Fire, and not the worship of Ashes.
- Gustav Mahler
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2010 8:55 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Are MARC subfields really useful ?
Quoting Dan Matei <dan_at_CIMEC.RO>:
>
> All subfields are useful enough to justify the effort to delimit them ?
>
> I thought we are looking for reducing the cost of cataloguing. Or not ?
I don't think we know what "subfielding" costs us. Is it more than
adding notes like "Includes bibliographic references" even though
there is also a coded element for that in the fixed fields? (Which is
up there with the idiocy of the 020 field, frustration that I share
with Andrew.) And even if something costs, don't we also have to look
at the value? Adding subject headings is very costly, from what I
hear, as is doing authority control. I suspect that those cost much
more than adding in subfielding. But what are they worth?
I've been sitting in on a group that will send a report this ALA (I
believe) to bigheads on ROI for cataloging -- not a study, but ideas
on what needs to be studied. It's a very difficult task. We don't know
what elements of our data lead to "user success" (however that is
defined). Without that information, it's darned hard to know what you
can and cannot eliminate from the cataloging task.
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Fri Jun 04 2010 - 11:26:46 EDT