[Koha] (no subject) Some info on MARC standards

[Baljkas Family]

Friday, August 20, 2004    17:06 CDT

Hi, Tazeen,

Stephen Hedges answered the most important part of your questions already, so this is just a little addendum (extra).
 
> secondly i want[ed] to ask that what i should fill in the
> add biblio form under the isbn field which i[s] further
> subdivided into linkage and field link and sequence number

These things are almost never seen in libraries, Tazeen. You do not need to worry about them.

The $6 Linkage subfield is specifically for alternate graphic representations.

In simpler English, this is for *different alphabetic or other writing systems* (Arabic, Amharic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese, Sanskrit, etc., etc.) *IF* your catalogue used multiscript (more than just Latin letters) displays.

(I don't think Koha is quite up to that yet. I've yet to see a system that really is. ;-) )

The $8 Field Link and Sequence Number is another thing not to worry over.

In simplest terms, it is used to provide more detailed information on items that are parts of a larger item (component parts) or that are reproductions of an original (reproduction).

If you want a headache, you can surf to URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdcntf.html#mrcs8> and read all about it. Even when Contents analysis is done in libraries (505 Note) it is exceedingly uncommon ever to see this.

In the 010 tag, Library of Congress Control Number, the $b subfield is NUCMC control number. NUCMC = National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. Again, this is not something you will likely ever see outside of the U.S.A. so please do not worry about it.

*** More importantly, if you do wonder about or have questions about MARC coding, you can find descriptions of the MARC standards and examples of how the fields are filled in, online, for free, via the Library of Congress Concise Format for Bibliographic Data page at
URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdhome.html>.
 This is part of the permanent MARC Standards information available at URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/marc.html>. ***

For your specific questions, you could surf to URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdnumb.html#mrcb010>
to find out about the 010 field (e.g. that you should add 3 blank spaces before entering the number, a long-standing practice), and further down that page to URL
<http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdnumb.html#mrcb020>
to read more about the 020 field (e.g. this shows that cataloguers remove the hyphens in ISBN numbers).

I hope this added information will be of some help, if not now, then in the future. Please feel free to write with any additional MARC (or other) questions any time.

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