Monday, August 2, 2004 20:10 CDT Hi, Scott, Dave, et al. Sorry for not replying earlier. It has been a hellish day with the electronics in this household. So much for a good holiday weekend. Bowing with grace to Dave Bigwood's expertise: thank you, Dave! Whenever you reply on cataloguing matters, you always manage to increase my understanding and/or correct deficits in my training and experience and I am truly grateful for that. I completely agree with what you said. My only defense, again, is that I literally had never seen what you so rightly pointed out is correct. Even the LC materials we had from my training (1997-1999) don't give the Form example for the 655 that you provided. Right now the closest examples to what Scott was talking about provided by LC in the MARC-21 Concise Bib info on 655 are the Dictionaries and Festschrift examples. These are hardly clarifying as Dictionaries would be a legitimate 650 SH and Festschriften do code in 008 (and are usually identified as such clearly in a 245 b or 245 c should that somehow be what patrons remember). Anyway, Dave, I am grateful. Thank you! I have amended my cataloguing notes duly. :-) Scott, I am glad that the rest of the material might be of some help to you. Have fun with the mapping. ;-)
In general, so far, MARC seems very book-centric.
To be fair, though, the book format is rather widespread ;-). MARC is print-centric, rather than just book-centric, mostly because it was created for libraries and text is the format of material still most common in libraries globally, whether it be traditional books or pamphlets, reports, magazines or academic journals. MARC has had some difficulties and growing pains in dealing with computer-related resources that are still being worked out (e.g. still ongoing are worries about clarifying whether a web-site is mostly textual or not) and from what I've seen and heard of archivists' and museologists' discussions, MARC is still less than perfect in their books (pardon pun), too. However, the fact that MARC has adapted for all the different materials it does handle does bode well for its future, despite Dublin Core et al. Anyway, excuse this digression, Scott. On to your question ...
I mean, it seems that information about authors and other related concepts will be repeated and duplicated quite a bit. If I have ten records listing books by Isaac Asimov, I'd end up with ten copies of his bibliographic data too.
That's probably because what you are intending goes well beyond the intentions of MARC which were/are bibliographic description of an item *in hand.* Although some books do list other works by the given author, the demands in cataloguing nowadays are usually for more items to be catalogued rather than that an individual item be examined beyond traditional standards of bibliographic description.
Is there any way around that?
Dave should definitely sound in on this, but it seems to me the easiest way would be using the 856 to link to a common page that you created for a given author. That way, each record's link could go to the same place and any corrections or additions would be facilitated as well.
I realize this is probably a side-effect of MARC's age and origins, when data normalization wasn't a big thing.
Definitely. From what a retired LC cataloguer told me, the whole idea of being able to organise the mass of information in the old card catalogues in brand new ways was the whole focus. The idea of adding to what was there is fairly new.
But I also don't know much yet about MARC. :)
But hey, you are learning a lot, and fast. Be proud. :-) Cheers, Steven F. Baljkas library tech at large Koha neophyte Winnipeg, MB, Canada