The internationalization of MARC ‐ part IV: UNIMARC, some formats based on it and some other MARC formats

Abstract

The continuing emergence of differences between national formats of MARC and the problems caused by them, were matters of concern at the start of the 1970s. The need for agreement on content designators for a common format and greater uniformity in cataloging practices were the most frequently occurring themes in the literature of the period (Gredley and Hopkinson, 1990).As a result of these issues, the idea of an international MARC network to study the problems caused by different formats appeared to be the best solution. An international MARC network study had to deal with the issues of normalization of descriptive data, normalization of subject data, communications networks, bibliographic data exchange policies, and cooperative planning and development. The issue of cooperative planning and development brought together many groups of MARC users. The getting together of the Library of Congress and the British National Bibliography for cooperative activities was followed by the INTERMARC group which was the first attempt to develop an international format. Another international attempt of the kind was ABACUS, the meeting of the representatives of the British Library, Library of Congress and the National Libraries of Australia and Canada to increase coordination in the forward planning of their MARC services. In addition, representatives from different countries involved in the early work in the Internatinal Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA, 1980, p. 1) working group on content designators also formed a group which worked on what was later to become UNI-MARC.The first and second editions of UNIMARC were published in 1977 and 1980 , respectively (IFLA, 1980. The introductory notes to the second edition stated that the scope of the format was to specify the tags, indicators and subfield codes to be assigned to bibliographic records in machine-readable form for monographs, serials, cartographic materials, films, music and sound recordings, and that eventually it would be expanded to include manuscripts and other forms of materials (IFLA, 1980, p. 1). This feature was a departure from the Library of Congress format which was 20

Japanese bibliographic records and CJK cataloging in U.S. university libraries.

“…Importantly, the fields 500-599 are noted for an access point: title headings, author headings and subject headings. Also, fields 650 for personal name used as subject heading and 658 topical subject headings have fields $a for kana, $x for Romanized forms, and $b for kanji (Kokabi, 1995). JAPAN/MARC is "a more UNIMARC-like format used for domestic publications, while MARC is used for foreign publications" (Drake, 2005, p.27).…”