REPORTS FROM THE
2010 ALA Annual Conference
Washington, D. C.

Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI)
Liaison Report
submitted by Cate Gerhart
University of Washington Libraries

This report includes updates on proposals and discussion papers of interest to the OLAC constituency from the recent ALA MARBI meetings in Washington DC.  If you would like to see the complete list of topics discussed, you can find them at the Library of Congress website.

Proposal No. 2 010-06: Encoding the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

This proposal extends the use of the $0 “Authority record control number” to be available for the new ISNI which is a unique identifier of public entities, enabling these entities to be disambiguated when necessary.

Proposal No. 2010-07: ISBD punctuation in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal looks at solutions to a problem submitted by the German National Library. They would like to be able to indicate in the bibliographic record when ISBD punctuation has been left out of the record and instead supplied by using the MARC coding.  This proposal passed with a number of amendments.  Check the format for exact wording, but the basic decision was to define a new code in Leader/18 (Descriptive Cataloging Form, “Desc” in OCLC).  The new code will be “c” and will indicate that punctuation has been excluded when redundant.  Also, code “i” was redefined to indicate that punctuation is included when coded “i”.  Small wording changes were also needed in some of the other codes.

Proposal No. 2010-08: Encoding Scheme of Coordinate Data in Field 034 (Coded Cartographic Mathematical Data) of the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

This proposal was tabled because more information was needed before a decision could be made.  The proposal seeks to find a way to indicate that a system other than the standard one was used to encode the coordinates of a map.  Although the bibliographic community has traditionally used one system, there are a number of other systems that it would be nice to use in our records when needed.

Proposal No. 2010-09: Addition of Subfield $u to Field 561 (Ownership and Custodial History) to the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Holding Formats.

This proposal passed with one amendment.  It added the $u to the 561 so that web links can be created to provide access to additional information about the ownership/custodial history of an item.  The amendment made the $u repeatable so that more than one link could be made if necessary.

Discussion Paper 2010-DP04: Encoding the ISTC in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

This discussion paper presented four options for encoding the new International Standard Text Code (ISTC) which was formally published as a standard in March 2009.  This standard defines an identification system for textual works intended for use by publishers, bibliographic services, retailers, libraries and rights management agencies.  The option that was preferred by the group was Option 2, which would record this identifier in the 024.  Because the 024 is already in the format no further work would be needed to implement this solution.

Discussion Paper 2010-DP05: Language Coding for Moving Images in Field 041 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This discussion paper looked at revising some definitions in the 008/35-37 and 041 $a and $j for moving images so that there was a distinction between spoken, sung and signed, and written language.  More discussion of the wording will be done using the MARBI list, but in general there was agreement that for moving image materials “zxx” should be used when there is no spoken, sung or signed content.  This would move all coding of subtitles, captions, intertitles, etc. to the 041.

The other topic discussed in this paper was how to predictably tell what the original language of a moving image is.  Currently this information might be in the 008/35-37, but sometimes this is the dubbed language, or it might be in the 041 $h, but there might be a number of $h’s in the record for other textual accompanying materials.  There was no clear consensus about how to proceed with this part of the paper and CAPC will be discussing this further to decide whether or not it thinks this is worth working on. It may be that in the future authority records or “work” level records could unambiguously indicate this information.