There has been some discussion in the past few days on the NACO Music
Project listserv about the impact of adding death dates to existing
headings and the fact that cross-references from the old form (without the
death dates) are not currently allowed in NACO records.
MARC Discussion paper 2006-04 discussed a couple of ways to include this
information in authority records. One was in 4XX fields, with newly
defined $w values. The other was in a note field, e.g. 683, which would
contain the former heading. The outcome of the MARBI discussions at ALA
Midwinter was "A new discussion paper will be written that explores various
options."
I would like to suggest possible components of other options. They do not
answer all of the issues raised at MARBI and would definitely require
system changes to implement, but probably any solution to the problem would
require implementation changes.
The first option I'm suggesting is a new variable field in authorities
modeled on the 886, Foreign MARC Information Field in the Bibliographic
Format. Such a field could have a separate tag identifying it as "Former
heading linking field" and it would be understood that this would contain
the tag and all content-designation of the original 1XX field that is being
cancelled. With a few additions, the content-designation of the 886 field
(see below) would allow the original tag, indicators, and subfields to be
record here, rather than just the text without the content-designation,
which is one of the flaws of the suggested 683 field. Only one tag would
have to be used for this purpose. An additional subfields appearing prior
to the subfields representing the heading could be defined for date and
textual information (e.g., put it all in subfield i) and/or subfield w
values relevant only to this field could be defined.
First Indicator
Type of field
0 Leader
1 Variable control fields (002-009)
2 Variable data fields (010-999)
Second Indicator
Undefined
# Undefined
Subfield Codes
$a Tag of the foreign MARC field (NR)
$b Content of the foreign MARC field (NR)
$2 Source of data (NR)
$a-z Foreign MARC subfield (R)
$0-9 Foreign MARC subfield (R)
Obviously, this is not a completely developed option, but I wanted to
suggest this as another way of approaching the issue - one that could allow
machine-manipulation of the data but could also allow for suppression of
indexing and display, if desired, because it would have a separate tag.
Another possibility would be to use something like the 87X fields that were
defined in the USMARC Bibliographic format to facilitate the flipping of
headings from AACR to AACR2. These contained a link to the field in the
bibliographic record that was to be replaced with the data in the 87X
field. Variant name field tags were defined for personal names (870)
corporate names (871), conference or meeting names (872), and uniform
titles (873). If you have old USMARC Bibliographic format data, you could
look this up.
Ed Glazier
Principal Analyst
RLG
2029 Stierlin Court
Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043-4684
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(650) 691-2261; fax (650) 964-0943
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