Re: Are MARC subfields really useful ?

I would appreciate it if the OPAC displayed the titles using only
subfield 'a' in a title browse list. I'm frequently asked to add an
additional one word title so patrons can easily find the single word
title when no one remembers the subtitle. For example in our catalog, a
search for "The promise :$b President Obama, year one" does not display
in the list of titles that are simply "Promise" but as #158 interfiled
in the list of those with longer 245's or subtitles. The same thing
happened with "The soloist". Not to mention all those discrepancies when
"a novel" is on the title page but not on the audiobook or paperback.


Janet

Janet Schrader
Bibliographic Services Supervisor
C/W MARS Inc.
67 Millbrook Street, Suite 201
Worcester, MA 01606
508-755-3323 ext. 25
fax: 508-757-7801
jschrader_at_cwmars.org
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Weinheimer Jim
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2010 10:49 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Are MARC subfields really useful ?

Dan Matei wrote:
<snip>
The question in the subject is brutal, in order to attract attention. I
know it is a blasphemy :-)

Of course the subfields are useful (as the TEI tags in scholarly
texts)... But:

"Does its usefulness justify the effort ?" That was my real question.

And, of course, we can refine it:

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 ?
</snip>

Dan is asking exactly the right question, and one that has long needed
answering. Although I wasn't working way back then, when they created
MARC format, they obviously could have done it much more simply, without
all of the subfields. It seems logical to me that they didn't yet know
whether this deeper layers of (what we now call) semantics were
necessary, but they didn't want to take a chance, so they decided to
code everything within an inch of its life. 

I think it's time to reconsider the usefulness of a lot of it. If some
of these fields haven't been used in almost 50 years now, I think we
have enough research data to come to some decisions.

We have already seen some of the real bloopers thrown overboard: some of
the tags, the old "main entry in the body of the entry" and others. But
nobody has asked the bigger questions yet. For example, I have brought
up a few times the need to code separately the 245 $a from $b. I
understand it had a purpose before (as I wrote to Alex once), primarily
to prevent different texts from inter-filing, e.g. my example "War and
peace : the definitive edition" and "War and peace in the nuclear age".
In the card catalog, it files correctly, but I haven't seen any OPAC do
it "right" and it has always been interfiled and therefore, "wrong". 

Still, almost nobody browses titles like this anymore, and I have
personally never even heard of a complaint, except from a librarian
(like me, who it drives absolutely crazy!). But I ask: if there are no
complaints and nobody even notices, is it still "wrong" to interfile
different titles proper? I think a case can be made that the 245$b is
really outmoded.

If this is accepted, then it is open season on all of the other
subfields and fixed fields. Do we really need a separately coded 100$b?
or 100$q? Why? Just because it's considered "correct" is not a reason to
continue it.

James Weinheimer  j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992