Jim Wwinheimer said: >One thing I think needs to be kept in mind is the purpose of the ISBD punct= >uation, which is language-independent. Here is a record I took at random fr= >om the catalog of the Russian National Library. Even though not everybody r= >eads Russian, any cataloger in the world can immediate understand what the = >various parts are because of the punctuation. Absolutely! I find it very difficult to read UKMARC records lacking ISBD punctuation (we produce them for one client). BUT as good and helpful as "/ : ;" are within their respective fields, ". --" *introducing* a field is ridiculous. The field tag tells you its a new element in the MARC display, and a new line (and usually a label) tells the patron that in an OPAC display.
The period can be there regardless, and coding can tell software where to introduce "--" if displayed as one paragraph without labels, which is very rare. We stopped keying the "--" decades ago. The period should have been removed from its field introduction function then. Punctuation within an element and between them are two different things; the ". --" instruction confuses that distinction. __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([email protected]) {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
