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DATE: December 14, 2009
REVISED:
NAME: ISBD punctuation in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
SOURCE: German National Library
SUMMARY: This paper explains the reasons that the German and Austrian parts of the MARC community do not provide ISBD punctuation when content designation identifies an element type. It proposes coding to indicate the absence of ISBD punctuation at the end of subfields via a Leader position.
KEYWORDS: Leader/18 (BD); ISBD punctuation; Punctuation
RELATED:
STATUS/COMMENTS:
12/14/09 - Made available to the MARC 21 community for discussion.
1/16/10 - Results of MARC Advisory Committee discussion: There was support for narrowing the use of Leader/18 to ISBD punctuation conventions. ISBD may be followed for description but not punctuation; participants thought that Leader/18 was an appropriate place to indicate this. A proposal is needed to add the new code for this purpose. Instead of code "n", which is often used in fixed fields for "Not applicable" a different code was recommended. In addition, it is necessary to make 040 $e (Description conventions) repeatable, since more than one convention may be applied to the record.
With the decision to move to MARC 21 the German and Austrian libraries had to review some of the common practices of the international MARC community. Among them was the inclusion of punctuation at the end of subfields of the primary transcription fields such as the 245, 250, and 260 and at the ends of these fields. When the MARC format was developed, existing data used various punctuation practices when transcribing title page information, depending on the rules employed at the time the cataloging was created. Therefore the MARC formats took as a premise that the punctuation in the data would be included in the data of the subfields according to the practices of the cataloging institution. Later, when the ISBD punctuation was developed it was treated likewise; the ISBD punctuation was ignored by the format for data identification purposes.
The MARC formats also took the approach that the purpose of content designation is to identify data elements for retrieval purposes. The transcription of title page information is often irregular with transition words (e.g., "and", "by", "edited with an introduction by") and names in direct order. MARC depends primarily on the inclusion of well formed access points and coded data and less on parsed transcription for indexing and access support. Thus in the title paragraph only the title and subtitle and part number and title are identified by subfield codes for indexing purposes. The German and Austrian communities also have experience with the difficulties of indexing elements in the transcription area as shown by an earlier proposal to add subfields to the 250 field (Edition statement) to carry normalized forms of the transcribed data.
In some formats, however, subfields or other content designation are used to replace ISBD punctuation so that it can then be reinserted for display purposes. This was again not feasible for MARC as different punctuation practices needed to be accommodated in the data. Using content designation to cue punctuation was also not considered an appropriate use of content designation in MARC 21.
Over time ISBD punctuation became more extensively specified in library cataloging rules and catalogs and its inclusion in MARC 21 records became common. As the ISBD punctuation became more and more elaborate, the MARC 21 format was spared from increasing the numbers of subfields in order to be able to apply ISBD punctuation since that was not a use for content designation. However, as the formatting of catalog data for end users changed from the paragraph style of the ISBD era to the tagged displays preferred today, the punctuation that catalogers supplied at the end of some subfields was less useful and today it is often removed for a clean display.
The German and Austrian community studied the issue and decided not to provide ISBD punctuation at the ends of subfields when using MARC 21. The reasons for this practice are the following.
- In their MAB format they made extensive use of tags to identify ISBD-specified elements, expecting to insert ISBD punctuation for end users via the tags. All of their data essentially followed the ISBD rules which were embedded in their RAK cataloging rules. From their point of view, the identification of an element is handled by the content designation, and when there is content designation to identify an element such as a subfield code or a new field tag, the inclusion of ISBD punctuation conventions is redundant identification.
- Economically, they also think that it can take catalogers too much effort and time to think about ISBD punctuation when it is at the end of a subfield and could be machine supplied when the data is presented to a user. New colleagues could learn cataloging more easily without having to care for such ISBD punctuation.
- Processing MARC data can be easier when a field does not have ISBD punctuation at the ends of subfields. Importing MARC data into a system with a local or internal data format that does not carry punctuation in data fields requires stripping off ISBD punctuation from the ends of subfields, not always leading to correct results (e.g. in cases of abbreviations at the end of a subfield).
In XML formats related to MARC 21, MARCXML may contain ISBD punctuation at the ends of subfields, whereas MODS does not allow this. As a consequence, the Library of Congress style sheets for the transformation of MARCXML to MODS contains a generic XSLT "chopPunctuation" routine that it applies to the end of MODS element values during the conversion.
It should be noted that the German and Austrian community does support use of the ISBD punctuation for presenting MARC data, or designing a citation string. Thus, a description of ISBD punctuation is useful to one who designs a presentation or display module of a system, but is not useful to a German or Austrian cataloger. The German and Austrian communities prefers substituting the punctuation for the subfield or field tag upon display instead of the common MARC practice of including the punctuation and then replacing a subfield code by a single blank for display. this is because the latter produces only the ISBD view and may need massaging for the labeled displays popular today, as noted above. In cases where they need punctuation at a subfield boundary because it cannot be determined by the subfield code, such as the 245 $b, they plan to include it in the data after the subfield delimiter (e.g., 245 10 $aInternationales Handbuch der Vornamen$b= International handbook of forenames).
The German and Austrian colleagues do not intend to promote their choice regarding ISBD punctuation as "best practice" or "better practice", but want a way to express inside a MARC record itself whether or not ISBD punctuation is included at the end of subfields. This would enable more efficient data exchange across communities and provide flexibility to MARC 21 users on the issue. The most promising place to provide this indication is Leader position 18 "Descriptive cataloging form". That position was used in the early days of the ISBD development to indicate ISBD formulation of the content, and then to indicate AACR2 records (which stipulated ISBD). With RDA the cataloging rules will be indicated in 040 subfield $e (Description conventions), where all other description rules used in creating MARC record are indicated. That provides an opportunity to focus Leader/18 more directly on the use of ISBD, and in particular, on the presence or absence of its punctuation at the end of subfields. This would be in keeping with the role of many other positions in the Leader to tell something about the form of the record to assist processing, such as the number of indicators per field, the record status, and the character encoding.
The current values in Leader/18 were defined with complex specifications that today may or may not be true in their entirety when they are used. The position is easy to determine when a record is initially encoded, but after records are augmented cooperatively all of the multiple facets of a code value may no longer all apply. While these values do not need to be made obsolete, with RDA they will become less critical except for retrospective data. The current definition of Leader/18 values reads as follows.
Leader/18 - Descriptive cataloging form.
One-character alphanumeric code that indicates characteristics of the descriptive data in the record through reference to cataloging norms. Subfield $e (Description conventions) of field 040 (Cataloging Source) may contain additional information on the cataloging conventions used. Code particularly indicates whether the descriptive part of the record exemplifies the rules of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), either within or outside of the framework of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition (AACR 2).
# - Non-ISBD
Descriptive portion of the record does not follow International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) cataloging and punctuation provisions. Examples of cataloging rules that do not follow ISBD conventions are: Catalog Rules, Author and Title Entries (1908); A.L.A. Catalog Rules, Author and Title Entries (1941); A.L.A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries (1949); and Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 1st Edition (AACR 1) (except the revised chapters).a - AACR 2
Descriptive portion of the record and the choice and form of entry of the access points are formulated according to either the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition (AACR 2) or cataloging manuals based on AACR 2, which follow ISBD in their descriptive cataloging sections. The punctuation practices of ISBD apply. The interpretation of AACR 2 contained in the AACR 2-based manuals primarily affects details concerning description; the access points generally remain consistent with AACR 2. Access points follow AACR 2 as to choice and form of entry.i - ISBD
Descriptive portion of the record is formulated according to the descriptive and punctuation provisions of ISBD. Heading forms are not formulated according to AACR 2. Includes: 1) records that use ISBD punctuation but whose other conventions are unknown; 2) new records that are basically formulated according to AACR 2 but contain heading forms not used under those rules; 3) records exemplifying ISBD punctuation practices applied to pre-AACR 2 records; and 4) records done according to AACR 1 revised chapter 6, Separately Published Monographs.u - Unknown
Institution receiving or sending data in Leader/18 cannot adequately determine the appropriate descriptive cataloging form used in the record. May be used in records converted from another metadata format.
When adopting MARC 21, Germany and Austria decided to encode Leader/18 with "#" (Blank) for "Non-ISBD" even though their present cataloging code for descriptive cataloging, Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK) is based on ISBD, indicating that value "i" might be appropriate. The use of # was intended to express that there is no ISBD punctuation at the ends of subfields. However, they have been told that this value can be misinterpreted as an indication that the data in such a record is of low quality, not being formulated to the highly regarded ISBD standard. Thus they discovered that the MARC 21 community used the Leader 18 not only literally but as a rough indicator of quality. The German and Austrian communities would like to have a value either in the Leader/18 or another place in the record to indicate that their records do not have the trailing ISBD punctuation.
Processing MARC 21 data could be made more flexible if there is one MARC 21 format element that tells whether there is ISBD punctuation at the ends of subfields, or not. In the first case, data can be processed and displayed as nowadays in common practice, whereas those who prefer not to carry the punctuation would be accommodated. Data exchange would be facilitated by an indication up front that the punctuation was or was not included.
Another future consideration of making it possible to omit the punctuation and signal that omission is that RDA claims not to be a display standard, leaving it optional for record displays to use ISBD punctuation.
Add a code in Leader/18:
n - ISBD, without ISBD punctuation at ends of subfields
The new code would indicate that the descriptive portion of the record is formulated according to the descriptive provisions of ISBD, but that the ISBD punctuation is omitted at the ends of subfields.
The revised Leader/18 description could at the same time be simplified as follows.
Leader/18 - Descriptive cataloging form
One-character alphanumeric code that indicates characteristics of the descriptive data in the record through reference to cataloging norms. Subfield $e (Description conventions) of field 040 (Cataloging Source) contain additional information on the cataloging conventions used such as RDA (Resource Description and Access), RAD (Rules for Archival Description), or CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects). This code particularly indicates the relationship of the descriptive part of the record to the rules of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD).
# - Non-ISBD
Descriptive portion of the record does not follow International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) cataloging and punctuation provisions.a - ISBD/AACR 2
Descriptive portion of the record and the choice and form of entry of the access points are formulated according to the description and punctuation provisions as incorporated into the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition (AACR 2) and its manuals.i - ISBD
Descriptive portion of the record is formulated according to the descriptive and punctuation provisions of ISBD.n - ISBD, without ISBD punctuation at ends of subfields
Descriptive portion of the record is based on the descriptive provisions of the ISBD but the punctuation conventions of ISBD are not included at the ends of subfields.u - Unknown
Institution receiving or sending data in Leader/18 cannot adequately determine the appropriate descriptive cataloging form used in the record. May be used in records converted from another metadata format.
1. Is a new code for Leader position 18 an appropriate solution? Can a new code designate the intended information, without harming the values already defined?
2. Is there another option for the information such as a variable field in the 0XX or 8XX range or a fixed field position?
3. What impact would this have for the implementation of RDA?
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