----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Matters before MARBI of interest to the cartographic community As the MAGERT liaison to the MARC Advisory Committee, I'd like to take this opportunity to inform you of the items that might be of interest at the upcoming MARBI meetings in San Francisco. There are few proposals of specific concern to the cartographic community, but there are some on which you might want to comment. Please get any comments to me by Tuesday, June 24th. Proposal 97-11 proposes adding a subfield to fields 043 (GEOGRAPHIC AREA CODE) and 044 (COUNTRY OF PUBLISHING/PRODUCING ENTITY CODE) in the bibliographic formats and to the 043 in the Community Information and Authority formats to accommodate indications of subentities. There was a discussion paper about subentity coding at the Midwinter meeting and this proposal reflects the discussions held then. Proposal 97-8 would change the definition of subfield "q" in the 856 field from "File transfer mode" to "Electronic format type". This change would provide a place to record the file format of the resource being described. The information would be recorded as type/subtype (for example: application/postscript, image/x-cmu-raster, audio/x-wav, etc.) Currently, there is no specific place to record this information. 97-9 would change the definition of the field 856 subfield u to accommodate the recording of a Uniform Resource Name as well as Uniform Resource Locators. Discussion Paper 101 concerns adding notes to the Holdings Format for 1) Immediate source of acquisition, 2) Ownership and Custodial History (formerly Provenance) , and 3) Copy and Version Identification Note. Discussion Paper 102 provides a summary of problems and possible solutions for dealing with non-filing characters. There has been some discussion on the USMARC list about non-filing characters in certain fields and this discussion paper stems from that discussion. Discussion Paper 100 discusses several characteristics -- language, script, transliteration, country (nationality), and catalog rules -- that might be coded in Authority records, indicating possible uses and problems, along with techniques. One of the chief questions is how useful would this data be. If you have any questions or comments on any of the proposals or discussion papers before the MARBI, please feel free to share them with me or the list. Thank you. Susan Moore Catalog Department Rod Library University of Northern Iowa Cedar Falls, Iowa