Rajesh Chandrakar wrote:
> will that be any problem during the importing of
> records in any system, if ISO file has interverning
> between the record terminator and first character of
> leader of the following record?
There would indeed be a problem for our production software, which would
regard such a file as corrupt and would terminate abruptly after the first
record. We do have programs which can clean such files, but we use these
only for analysis and never in production. If we encounter a file like
this, our normal practice would be to ask to sender to correct and re-send
it.
> One more question, what characters are being used as a
> record and field terminators in MARC21 and how it is
> being represented.
The record terminator is hexadecimal 1D and the field terminator is
hexadecimal 1E. There is no standard graphic representation for either of
these. The record terminator is usually not displayed at all, but when
necessary may be represented as \ or +. The field terminator may be
represented as ^ or + or ¶, but is also often not displayed.
> but the document which I mentioned above is written by
> Library of Congress itself. Will you pleaes let me
> know which one is the recognised document for it.
You referred to "Understanding of Bibliographic Format MARC21." The closest
thing to that I'm aware of is "Understanding MARC Bibliographic" at
http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/. That's an excellent general introduction, but
for technical information on the MARC 21 format you want "Specifications for
Record Structure, Character Sets, and Exchange Media" at
http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/.
Gary L. Smith
Software Architect
Database Services Department
OCLC
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