Although I acknowledge Roy's points and agree with them. I do think the
research on identifying what MARC fields and subfields have been used is
necessary and beneficial for going forward, but I think the normative
question of what data is useful is more interesting and important. Let
me give a few examples of why I think this besides just format-specific
usage.
Some fields that show up a lot don't seem very useful. In my opinion,
one of these is the 530 note, which says things like "Also available
online" or "Also available on videocassette." If the other version is
already in the catalog being searched, hopefully it should have already
come up in whatever search was done. In the more likely case that it's
not in the local catalog being searched, it confuses users, who often
interpret the note to mean the other version is available to them.
Presumably a system that did a better job of incorporating FRBR
relationships would make this note obsolete anyway.
On the other hand, there are some things that I think ought to be in
MARC that aren't. I have devoted a lot of effort to trying to get some
of these that are related moving image materials added. One that still
isn't there is a consistent, machine-actionable place to unambiguously
record the date of original release of a moving image in the
bibliographic record. Original release date is generally given in
citations for movies and TV programs so it's clear that it's important
to users.
Use can be unreliable for other reasons. For example, there is a
chicken and egg problem with many data elements. Some of these are old
elements which were prescient, but not used by systems. This led many
catalogers to stop bothering with these fields despite their potential
usefulness. As a former colleague put it, "I got tired of cataloging for
my grandchildren." At my former library, we came up with a way to allow
users to search for chamber music by instrumentation
(http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/librarycatalogs/chambermusic.htm), but we
had long ago stopped populating the 048 coded instrumentation fields
that we needed to drive the searches. This left us with a lot of work to
fill in the missing gaps in the data.
A lot of newer fields and subfields don't seem to get a lot of use.
It's partially because they are often niche elements, but it's also that
they tend not to be supported by systems so they're not searchable in
useful ways and they're often not publicized enough so that the broader
community of catalogers know about them. This isn't necessarily a
reflection of their potential value.
Although application profiles may be a good solution for specialized
data, there have to be the time and resources to set them up and
maintain them. For smaller special interest groups, this may be
difficult or impossible. As the OLAC liaison to CC:DA, I feel
overwhelmed by the number of changes that we would like to see in the
way moving images and other media materials are handled in RDA. OLAC is
struggling with tackling this as well as creating best practice
guidelines for RDA. It's hard for me to see that we have the resources
for a major project on another front, such as an application profile for
a new bibliographic framework.
Kelley
Kelley McGrath
University of Oregon
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