Friends,
After two weeks' holiday in Portugal, I was both surprised and concerned at
the extensive message exchange over the codes and names for Serbian and
Croatian, and the parallels drawn (and usages documented) from other
sources. Anyhow, I consider the outcome is sound.
John Clews made a remark on June 7 on how widespread the usage can be, with
specific reference to the British and Swedish code lists. So far, as I
understand it, there is no evidence that BL will change into 639-2B. For the
Swedish national bibliography, and the Swedish LIBRIS network, we have had
to add codes even to the UKMarc list, as you could see from the attempt at a
comparative list I sent out to you. For the users of that database, it would
mean a considerable loss of details and granularity if e.g. the old Nordic
languages were to be amalgamated into the group code for old Germanic
languages, as 639-2B specifies. Something similar goes for the Sami
languages, while others are more far-fetched. We do not have much material
in the languages of the American Indian tribes.
So I suspect that the national usage in LIBRIS will continue, while, of
course, we would be willing to export LIBRIS records in pure MARC21 format
after a format conversion that would also mean a translation into the
language code specified for MARC21. In that case, you go from a list with
more details into one of fewer, so that would cause us no real problems.
Regards,
Sten
*********************************
Sten Hedberg
Expert on cataloguing and standardisation
Uppsala University Library
POBox 510, S-751 20 UPPSALA Sweden
Voice +46-(0)18 471 3970
Fax +46-(0)18 471 3941
|