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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