Last month we upgraded our library search interface to a new tool which reads various things from MARC records to enable easy faceted searches, for example publication date, language, etc. Some weird stuff showed up in the language facet, and in investigating it, we uncovered an interesting factoid which I thought I'd share. EAD says that @LANGCODE in the LANGMATERIAL element should use the ISO 639.2 codes; however, our new search tool recognizes only MARC codes. So I mapped the two to see how different they were, and it turns out the two code lists are identical apart from three instances. Interestingly, all three are Eastern European languages -- Croatian (ISO code hrv and MARC code scr), Moldavian (ISO code rum and MARC code mol), and Serbian (ISO code srp and MARC code scc).

Anyone have any idea where/why they came up with "hrv" for Croatian??

Michele

(be green - don't print this email!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michele Combs
Manuscripts Librarian
Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University Libraries
222 Waverly Ave.
Syracuse, NY  13244
315-443-2081
[log in to unmask]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~