Eric, This is definitely not a feature of MARC but rather a feature of your local ILS (Aleph 500). Those are local fields for which you'd need to make a translation to a standard MARC field if you wanted to move that information to another system that is based on MARC.
Steve On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Are alpha characters used for field names valid in MARC records? > > When we do dumps of MARC records our ILS often dumps them with FMT and CAT > field names. So not only do I have glorious 246 fields and 100 fields but I > also have CAT fields and FMT fields. Are these features of my ILS -- > extensions of the standard -- or really a part of MARC? Moreover, does > something like Marc4J or MARC::Batch and friends deal with these alpha field > names correctly? > > -- > Eric Lease Morgan >