Berhard Eversberg said:
>The introduction says:
>"The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is
>intended to serve as a principal standard to promote universal
>bibliographic control [UBC] ...
RDA's abandonment in large measure of the tried and successful ISBD
standard is a great blow to the IFLA goal of UBC, and international
exchange of bibliographic records. More important than punctuation
(which some think of ISBD as being) is the selection and order of
elements. The deconstruction of ISBD and MARC is some OPAC displays
leaves me confused, e.g., the moving of all added entries up with main
entry is advance of title.
>The 1974 draft says, specifically, that "To achieve these aims it was
>necessary to find a way by which the different elements making up a
>description could be recognized, by the eye or by a machine, without the
>need to understand their content. The means adopted is a prescribed
>system of punctuation."
With, as you point out, MARC coding, and I suspect any other system of
machine coding, ISBD punctuation does not serve the purpose of machine
recognition of elements. For that reason, if no other, the silly bit
of having ". --" *introduce* an element, should be changed to having a
point end all elements. BUT. As any of us know who are less
multilingual and multiscript savy than you Bernhard, the ISBD
punctuation is of tremendous help in coping with records in languages
and scripts outside our comfort zone. ISBD punctuation serves the
same purpose in display; "/", for example. freeing us of the
introduction "[by]", "[par]", etc. in the language of text. Am I the
only cataloguer old enough to remember how helpful that change was?
>But instead, MARC became, from the beginning, inextricably
>intertwined with ISBD, even carrying the punctuation, redundantly
...
The MARC coding serves the machine. The ISBD punctuation the human
viewer. These are two functions, and thus not redundant. UKMARC's
introducing the ISBD punctuation on the basis of coding is popular
with some. But apart from "--", uniform title "[ ]", and series "(
)", I like to see that punctuation in the draft record I am preparing
or editing, particular for an unfamiliar language. (We still have
some old records lacking "[ ]" for GMD.)
>What we need is, I think, an ISBRF (International Standard
>Bibliographic Record Format) that can serve for communication (no
>longer on paper) between systems of all sizes and flavors and
>understood by all of them without human intervention -
Agreed. But we also need an ISBDF. an international Standard Display
Format, which allows patrons to transfer catalogue use skills from
library catalogue to library catalogue, from continent to continent.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
