[Koha] Re: Advice on MARC21 fields

[Steven F.Baljkas]

Thursday, February 16, 2006    19:21 CST

Greetings again, Rodica,

Just a quick addendum to Stephen Hedge's answer (I actually haven't received your original message quoted in Stephen's reply on the listserv, which is kinda weird since I did get your other message okay) ...

> From: "Stephen Hedges" <shedges at skemotah.com>
> Date: 2006/02/15 Wed AM 11:55:26 CST
> To: "Balasa Rodica" <rodica.balasa at nemesisit.ro>
> CC: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> Subject: Re: [Koha] Re: Advice on MARC21 fields
> 
> Basically, USMARC is the "old" MARC 21.  See
> http://www.loc.gov/marc/annmarc21.html

The official party-line is that MARC21 represents the harmonization of USMARC and CAN/MARC.

(Actually, Stephen, there is a lot more of CAN/MARC in MARC21 then you would find pure USMARC. But that's only visible in minutia.)

Also note, that UKMARC is coming together with it, too. Whatever Australians called their national version of MARC was already so close to the harmonized achievement as to make no significant difference (one of the benefits doubtless of being the Aussies being the only folks actually to use AACR as it is written without trying to write themselves permissions for archaic, institutionalised, idiosyncratic practices as "Babylon on the Potomac" is wont to, copied in smaller part by whatever we're supposed to call the NLC this week ;-) ). In any case, MARC21 is emerging as a global standard, one that will likely surpass internationalist efforts at maintaining UNIMARC.

As for standards for MARC21, Rodica, there may be Romanian national conventions for coding in various fields, etc. Your national library's cataloguing department/service should be able to advise you on that. They should also have information on any definitions of terminologies that may not be immediately familiar to you. You should feel free to ask on this listserv, too, or better yet subscribe to a cataloguing listserv and try there. And Google is great for finding relevant library science terminology.

If you need information on MARC21 standards, there are, of course the volumes that you can purchase from the Cataloguing Services Directorate at LC.

However, you can access a good deal of the same information, including examples of application, online for free. For Bibliographic Format (what you need to describe monographs, etc.), surf to
   URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdhome.html>

If you have specific questions, feel free to e-mail me on or off listserv as you like (off listserv is probably better as the Koha listserv is not really for cataloguing questions per se).

Hope this addendum helps a bit.

Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, Canada

==========================================================================

Balasa Rodica said:
>
> Hello,
>
> I come back with more specific questions.
>
> I corresponded with another university in Romania, that has implemented
> another system (MicroVTLS.), and the information is stored in USMARC.
> Are there differences between USMARC and MARC21? Maybe there are chances
> that for Romanian books, to import some of the definitions from this
> source.
>
> Generally at Koha installation, everybody uses the default Koha
> configuration for MARC21, or are some changes required?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Rodica Balasa

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