On 23 Feb 2008, at 3:22 PM, Adam M. Goldstein wrote: > If anybody wants to tinker with the Z39.50 importer, here is some > advice. The 245 field has sub-fields a and b; a is the title, b is the > subtitle. These are reliably separated by: > > _:_ > > where "_" is a space. Indeed, if you look at records imported that > have both fields, you will see that BD imports it so that the title > field has > > Title : subtitle > > It would be useful to strip the initial space because this is not how > people usually want the separation between title and subtitle. > > This is pretty reliable---I would be surprised if there was a single > record in the LOC catalog that wasn't like this. This punctuation was > the standard when the card catalog was used, and it was carried over > into the MARC age. (It is not a MARC standard though; it's part of the > ISBD standard, International Standard Book Description). >
It's annoying that MARC does not have reliable fields, otherwise we did not even have to bother about this. What's the sense about a value like "$aTitle :$bSubtitle", there really is no need whatsoever for the extra space and colon, as the 'b' already indicates the subtitle. I've often wondered who designed the atrocity called MARC. Anyway, I've just added yet another cleaning step to the MARC parser to fix this. > Another point of interest is that the initial character of sub-field b > will not be capitalized, unless it's a proper name, in which case it > will be. I suppose this is more of a matter of taste and style, but it > seems to me rare that someone would want to produce BD output in which > the first character of the sub-title is not capped. So maybe the > importer should do this too. > > I think this is an ISBD standard as well---so pretty reliable. > > -Adam I don't want to do this ourselves. Capitalization is too often a context sensitive matter. Christiaan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
