Thanks, Terry, Kyle, et al. To Terry's point, I was too lazy to review the rules for sorting fields, but hoping someone wiser would chime in. Yeah, I'm going to keep sorting indiscriminately until I see a problem or someone complains.
In my example it's an 035. I considered not re-sorting at all, but it just looks so wrong, even if I am busting any field order "magic" in the process. Jason Jason Stirnaman Lead, Library Technology Services University of Kansas Medical Center [email protected] 913-588-7319 On Sep 12, 2014, at 12:11 PM, Terry Reese <[email protected]> wrote: > I was so hoping someone would bring up position of MARC fields. Everything > Kyle says is true -- and I would follow that up by saying, no one will care, > even most catalogers. In fact, I wouldn't even resort the data to begin with > -- outside of aesthetics, the sooner we can get away from prescribing some > kind of magical meaning to field order (have you ever read the book on > determining 5xx field order, I have -- it's depressing; again, who but a > cataloger would know) we'll all be better off. :) > > --tr > > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kyle > Banerjee > Sent: Friday, September 12, 2014 12:44 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] ruby-marc: how to sort fields after append? > > On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 9:20 AM, Galen Charlton <[email protected]> wrote: > >> ... >> One caveat though -- at least in MARC21, re-sorting a MARC record >> strictly by tag number can be incorrect for certain fields... > > > This is absolutely true. In addition to the fields you mention, 4XX, 7XX, and > 8XX are also not necessarily in numerical order even if most records contain > them this way. There is no way to programatically determine the correct > sort. While this may sound totally cosmetic, it sometimes has use > implications. Depending on how the sort mechanism works, you could > conceivably reorder fields with the same number in the wrong order. > > The original question was how to resort a MARC record after appending a field > which appears to be a control number. I would think it preferable to iterate > through the fields and place it in the correct position (I'm assuming it's > not an 001) rather than append and sort. > > However, record quality is such a mixed bag nowadays and getting much worse > that tag order is the least of the corruption issues. Besides, most displays > normalize fields so heavily that these type of distinctions simply aren't > supported anymore. > > kyle
