MARBI is an interdivisional committee of ALA charged with encouraging the creation of standards for machine-readable bibliographic information, and with reviewing changes to the MARC format. I will be attending the MARBI sessions at the Midwinter meeting of ALA in Philadelphia on Jan. 12 and 13. There are several papers on the agenda that may be of particular interest to ARLIS members:

This paper, largely written by Sherman Clarke and
submitted by ARLIS and VRA, discusses the long-standing difficulty with providing controlled access to exhibition venues that are considered buildings rather than corporate bodies: for example, some (though not all) palazzi in Italy, or buildings such as the now-demolished Coliseum in New York. Buildings, as opposed to corporate bodies, are considered incapable of performing any role that would justify an added entry; they are established in the subject file, and authorized for topical use only. This view of buildings is unlikely to change with the release of RDA; but since MARC is not bound to any set of cataloging rules, the paper argues for adjusting MARC to allow catalogers to trace as added entries buildings that function as exhibition or performance venues. Three solutions are explored: 1) defining a new code “c” in authority field 008/14 for headings that can be used as added entries but not main entries; 2) using the authority field 667 to indicate headings that can be used as added but not main entries; and 3) defining a new 7XX field in the bibliographic record for entities defined in the subject authority file that have a non-topical association with the resource (this solution would paralled field 751, Added entry, Geographic name, which is used for place names with a non-topical assocation).

This paper discusses a new field for recording information that would assist users to determine the copyright status of the resource being described (the submitters stress that the cataloging agency need not pronounce on whether the item is under copyright, but simply supply readily available information that would help users determine this status, or point them in the direction of further research). The types of information covered include creator(s), personal creator death date , nationality of the creator, copyright holder(s), including contact information , copyright statement from the piece, copyright status: under copyright, public domain, unknown (note that this changes over time), resource dates such as date of copyright, date of copyright renewal, date of publication, and date of creation, publisher name, publication status (published/unpublished), and country of publication or creation. A very interesting paper—though it does seem to waver between two different views of the field’s purpose: that it’s there to help users make up their own minds about the copyright status of an item, and that it’s there to tell users what the copyright status is. Read it and make up your own minds …

This paper discusses a whole grab bag of issues related to encoding RDA using MARC 21. RDA is much more granular than AACR, and now MARC may have to play catchup. The paper discusses a number of instances where data defined by RDA as separate subelements would need new MARC subfields; examples include distributor information, copyright dates, and birth, death, and activity dates. Bringing MARC into line with FRBR is another thorny topic. The FRBR relational database model can’t be fully implemented in MARC as we know it, and even the halfway implementation being suggested is a little scary: for example, _all_ copy specific information would be banished to the outer darkness of holdings or item records. RDA has greatly reduced the use of brackets to identify supplied information, on the grounds that users do not understand what they mean. Now the Joint Steering Committee (JSC), which is responsible for RDA, is requesting that MARBI consider defining some sort of coding (e.g., control characters) to replace brackets in situations where an entire element or sub-element has been supplied. Another interesting twist: the JSC has requested not one but two values for identifyng RDA as a cataloging code: one for plain vanilla RDA, and one for RDA with ISBD punctuation.

Other papers under discussion are: Proposal 2008-01: Representation of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) System in the MARC 21 formats; Proposal 2008-03: Definition of first indicator value in field 041 (Language code) of the MARC 21 bibliographic format; Discussion Paper 2008-DP02: Making field 440 (Series Statement/Added Entry--Title) obsolete in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format; Discussion Paper 2008-DP03: Definition of subfield $3 for recording information associated with series added entry fields (800-830) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format.