Have I misunderstood this or has the BL decided not to follow MARC21? The
message below suggests there will be no distinction between "traced" and
"untraced" series in the BL catalogue.
I don't have strong feelings about the recent changes to MARC21 but I am
concerned if BL-derived records will be different from LC- or PCC-derived
records or if extra duplication of records happens on OCLC.
There are several other implications. For example, will the BL create
authority records for untraced as well as traced series, or neither? If
neither, it will become difficult to maintain consistency and to guide
users to variant forms of series title and title changes. If both, this
seems like more work than following standard MARC21. Or maybe the BL
LMS works differently to ours...
Since MARC21 is maintaining the distinction between traced and untraced
series titles we will do the same. However, if we have a BL record we
will always have to examine it to see whether or not it needs an 830
adding and the 490 indicator changing to avoid inconsistency in our
catalogue.
I'm assuming the "generic" series title referred to below is a non-unique
series title, such as Studies in French literature (there are series with
this title published by Edward Arnold and Edwin Mellen). However, there
are non-unique series titles which we would have recorded as 490.0 without
worrying about other instances of the same series title - I'm thinking of
all the Italian series such as "Saggi". Will the BL be adding 830s for
these?
I'm sure people can think of other problems which will arise if the BL
doesn't follow standard MARC21 practice.
--
Rose-Ann Movsovic email: [log in to unmask]
Collections Manager tel: 0118 378 7487
University of Reading Library, UK web: www.reading.ac.uk/library
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From: "Young, Brenda" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 09:46:09 -0000
In response to the decision by MARBI (2008-07) to make the MARC field
440 field obsolete, the British Library is changing its policy on
recording series information in its bibliographic records. The revised
policy takes into consideration the Library of Congress series policy
and the BL's requirement to ensure consistency and accuracy in derived
records with minimal intervention.
From January 12th 2009 the 440 field will no-longer be used to record
series titles in records created or edited by the British Library.
From that date it will be our practice to transcribe the form of series
appearing on the item in a 490 field for every volume in a series. The
830 field will only be created when the series title is 'generic'. In
such a case the generic title will be made unique by qualifying it with
the authorised form of the issuing body and adding this to the record as
an 830 access point.
The British Library has far too many records containing 440 fields for
us to consider converting them all to 490 fields at this time. We will,
however, change any 440 fields on derived records to 490 and change any
440 fields to 490 fields on existing records which are being edited for
any reason. We will retain any additional 830 fields which already exist
in derived records, whether they contain a generic series titles or not.
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