June 1998 Report
Rutherford W. Witthus
SAA Liaison to MARBI
 

This is a report of the MARBI meeting held in June 1998 in Washington, DC. I have annotated the agenda with decisions (marked with ***) made at the meeting.  If you have questions about any of these decisions, please contact me and I will present more detail.

ALCTS/LITA/RASD Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI)

AGENDA ALA ANNUAL CONFERENCE
June 26-28, 1998 Washington, DC

1. Proposal No. 98-8: Coding of Exceptions to Regularity Patterns in Field 853-855 in the USMARC Holdings Format
***Approved with Option 2.

2. Proposal No. 98-9: Changes to the USMARC Classification Format for Number Building
***Approved.

3. Proposal No. 98-10: Definition of Subfield $0 for Record Control Number in the 7XX Fields in the USMARC Classification and Community Information Formats
***Approved with changes.

4. Proposal No. 98-7: Recording Incorrect Dates in Field 008/06-14 in the USMARC Bibliographic Format
***Approved with RLG's suggested changes.

5. Proposal No. 98-15: Obsolete Fields in the USMARC Bibliographic Format
***Rejected; will be submitted to CANMARC.

6.  Proposal No. 98-17: Reading Program Information in the USMARC Bibliographic Format
***Approved with RLG's suggested changes.

7.  Proposal No.98-12: Additional Indicator Value in Field 355 (Security Classification Control) of the USMARC
Bibliographic Format
***Approved.

8.  Proposal No. 98-14: Additional Code List for Field 052 of the USMARC Bibliographic Format
***Approved with Option 1 and additional indicator value.

9.  Proposal No. 98-13: Defining Field 856 in the USMARC Authorities Format
***Approved.  This proposal could have an impact on archival authority records.  The proposal extends the 856 field to the
Authorities format as a potential means of improving access to information about the entity covered by the authority record.  Some libraries are already including URLs in OPAC display of authority records (corporate names linked to corporate web sites).  Conceivably, archival authority records could link to the Biographical or Historical Note of an online finding aid to enhance access to information about the person or organization.

10.  Discussion Paper No. 110: Enhancement of Computer File 007 in the USMARC Bibliographic/Holdings Formats
***Discussion to be continued on USMARC list.

11. Proposal No. 98-11: Changes to the USMARC Holdings/Bibliographic Formats Resulting from the New Holdings Standard (Z39.71)
***Approved with changes.

12. Proposal No. 98-18: Unicode Identification and Encoding in USMARC Records
***Approved with Option 1 in 3.2.

13. Proposal No. 98-16: Nonfiling Characters in all Formats
***Approved in principle, to be revisited at Philadelphia meeting.