Library of Congress

MDS Technical Notice

November 1, 2000

Changes in MARC Distribution Services
Effective January 2001

There are some upcoming changes in the MARC Distribution Services (MDS), beginning in January 2001. Three major changes/impact areas are listed below.

1. LCCN Restructuring

The Library of Congress has announced previously (see http://www.loc.gov/marc/lccn.html) a planned restructuring of the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) for newly assigned LCCNs. As of January 1, 2001, all newly assigned LCCNs (fields 001 and 010 in records distributed by CDS) will contain a two-character alphabetic prefix, a four-digit year portion, and a six-digit serial portion. The number of characters in the LCCN will remain the same (12), but the trailing blank or supplement number will be discontinued. Previously assigned LCCNs will not be changed to the new structure, and update records will continue to be distributed under the old style LCCN.

Examples:

Old style	New style
gm#82012345#	gm2001012345
###00456789#	##2002456789
n##99005678#	n#2001005678

CDS has created a file of test records containing both the new and old style LCCNs for use by customers. The two test files, one containing bibliographic records and the other containing name authority records, are available via anonymous FTP at:

Host: ftp.loc.gov
Login: anonymous
Password: <your email address>
Directory: pub
Subdirectory: cds/lccn
Filename: biblccntest (bibliographic test file); authlccntest(authority test file)

Or download directly from the Web at: ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/cds/lccn

biblccntest (bibliographic test file)
authlccntest (authority test file)

CDS has previously announced (see http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds-ils.html ) plans to distribute records containing the full MARC character set. This includes the 13 characters which were authorized as of 1994 but have been filtered or substituted in distribution by CDS.

See list below:

Character Name	Hex Value
spacing circumflex	5E
spacing underscore	5F
spacing grave	60
opening curly bracket	7B
closing curly bracket	7D
spacing tilde	7E
degree sign	C0
lower case script L	C1
phono copyright mark	C2
copyright mark	C3
sharp	C4
inverted question mark	C5
inverted exclamation mark	C6

In January 1, 2001, CDS will remove the character substitution step and will distribute records with these characters. Subscribers can expect to receive records containing characters and hex values listed above, but some of the values may not be actively supplied by LC cataloging staff. For a detailed listing of the LC usage of these characters see the LC Cataloging Policy and Support homepage (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/)

CDS has created test files containing records with these new characters. The two test files, one containing bibliographic records and the other containing name authority records, are available via anonymous FTP at:

Host: ftp.loc.gov
Login: anonymous
Password: <your email address>
Directory: pub
Subdirectory: cds/lccn
Filename: bibchars (bibliographic test file); authchars (authority test file)

Or download directly from the Web at: ftp:/ftp.loc.gov/pub/cds/lccn

bibchars (bibliographic test file)
authchars (authority test file)

3. Changes in MDS Frequency

Beginning in January 2001, CDS will increase the frequency of some of its MARC Distribution Services. All the quarterly MDS services will be distributed monthly and the monthly MDS-Serials service will be distributed weekly. See the chart below:

MDS	Old Frequency	New Frequency
Books Arabic	quarterly	monthly
Books Hebrew	quarterly	monthly
Computer Files	quarterly	monthly
NUCMC and LC Manuscripts	quarterly	monthly
Serials [CONSER]	monthly	weekly

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