Ed Jones said: >Ideally, the 4XX tag would automatically generate ". -- " before >displaying its content,
Very few OPACs I see still use the "--" display convention. Instead each element begins with a label on a new line. I normally don't agree when something is objected to as "card practice" carried over. But in this case, it really does apply. This practice should have ended with the end of the printed unit card. Let's remove ". --" as introducing an element in ISBD, and simply end all elements with a final mark of punctuation, considering them to be sentences. But no double punctuation please. Dashes, new paragraphs, and/or labels, would be a matter for the OPAC software. In today's deconstructed ISBD displays, there is no way of knowing whether 490 (400, 410, 411, and 440 are past practice) will be displayed after 300 even if present. To base 300 end punctuation on such an unknow and unknowable is *ridiculous*, and creates pointless variation. The same applies to the final punctuation in all MARC fields. __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([email protected]) {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
