Jeffrey Trimble <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Historically many of the indicators were used for card production
>generation.
The 245 1st indicator yes; the 245 2nd indicator no. The filing
indicator does nothing for cards. SLC once used filing indicators to
determine order in microform and printed catalogues (which in Canada
were more often a transition between cards and OPACs than in the
States). Our last printed catalogue customer switched to OPAC very
recently. I suspect there are still printed catalogues somewhere in
the world.
We took over the production of our on catalogues, and found there is
no substitute from having a cataloguer learn programming. Our first
microform catalogue (ordered from UTLAS) lacked title main entries,
because the programmer understood there was no title entry if the 245
1st indicator was "0"!
We find 6XX 2nd indicators very helpful in selecting subject headings
for various clients. The extension of 6XX indicators to 655 was very
helpful. The strange coding of LCGFT has thrown an expensive monkey
wrench into our export programs.
We need more programmers at the decision making table. Those who make
these decisions seem to have no concept of the effect of what they do.
>And we'll have to assume that the card production environment is
>DEAD.
That's a wrong assumption, even in North America. We stopped
producing handsome Wilson look-a-like sets of cards (LC never printed
headings), when most customers switched to microform or print
catalogues. But we still produce sets of catalogue cards on fan fold
card stock, using indicators.
>That all said, well and good, we will have a much larger problem at
>hand: the ILS vendors themselves.
YES!!!!! That is why our first effort should have been directed to
the building (the OPAC) not the building blocks (MARC/AACR2).
> ... they transfer it to some internal tables, and strip off the guts
>of the record. Exporting it out of that ILS is impossible.
YES!!! A considerable portion of our business is replacing stripped
down records when system migration time comes. Some ILS combine all
1XX and 7XX entries into one "Author" field with delimiters. (We look
at Cutter to decide which was the main entry, with biography a major
problem). The first question a vendor should be asked is "can you do
MARC out"? No ILS is forever.
>If we were to transfer MARC21 to and XML structure, I think we would
>have as many XML standards as there are catalogers in the world.
Or programmers in the world. Again, in attempting to replace MARC, we
are approaching the building blocks rather than the structure itself.
>XML is a wrapping language not a standard.
YES. And it plays havoc with the use of "< >" in bibliographic
records to indicate uncertain information, as LC and some other
libraries do. We made frequent use of "< >" in our written client
procedures to indicate data to be supplied, e.g., 260$c<year>. That
opening "<" became garbage when we put client procedures on Drupal,
and Drupal has no global change capability.
Some speak of our catalogues as "silos". It seems to me cataloguers,
programmers, and systems designers are in silos, hardly communicating,
and not understanding each other when they do.
Jeff's posts are the *first* indication I've seen that *anybody* deals
with the same reality as we.
I suggest we appoint Jeff as the Avram of our time. Others seem to be
lost in a cloud of theory, without grounding in reality.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([log in to unmask])
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
|