This is one in a series of messages emanating from the University of
California, San Diego Cataloging Committee discussing on proposals and
discussion papers on the agenda for MARBI at Midwinter.
UCSD would like to express strong support of Proposal 98-1 which expands the
210 field to allow inclusion of abbreviated titles other than the
abbreviated key title. Our public services staff find the ability to search on
abbreviated titles extremely useful. At their request, we did a project to add
abbreviated forms of titles to the records for our currently received serials.
One of our clever programmers wrote a program to detect whether a 210 field was
present in our records and, if not, use the OCLC record number as a hook to the
OCLC database, grab the 210 from the OCLC record and paste it into our record.
But our Medical School librarians are not very happy that the NLM abbreviated
titles were not included in the project. This change in coding would enable us
to capture such data (and to contribute it as well). While we have put
abbreviated titles from other sources in 246 fields upon request, the absence
of distinctive tagging has prevented us from doing an automated enhancement.
Crystal Grahan
Chair, Cataloging Committee
University of California, San Diego
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