Sally McCallum recommends the USMARC introduction
> http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/
>
and indeed, it is an excellent work.
Incidentally, we have just this week mounted a kind of electronic textbook,
in German, on library data formats in general:
http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/allegro/formate
It contains material on USMARC but also the German formats (MAB1/MAB2) and
the Dutch Pica3 and Pica+.
There is one particular section I want to point out to this list:
"TOP33 - the 33 most used USMARC fields"
at http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/allegro/formate/formneu.htm#top33
This list gives the percentages of use of fields in LC records as evaluated
in a German project (all LC bib records were evaluated as of Dec 1997)
Added to this list are the DC element names relating to the MARC fields,
to show whether or not those supposedly iportant fields are represented
in Dublin Core.
I'm now beginning to wonder: Since there is no other format better documented
and field tested than USMARC, why is it necessary to invent another syntax,
completely different, for DC data? If you look at DC data with USMARC-trained
eyes, you find them extremely clumsy, bulky, wasteful, and still way behind
the versatility and expressiveness of USMARC - when the original intention
was for something much simpler than USMARC...
Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel. +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX -5836
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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