Encoding Standards: ALA Annual Report 2023

Report by Ethan D’Ver, Chair, Encoding Standards Subcommittee

Selected Summary

Discussion Paper No. 2023-DP07: Recording Numeric Designation of Musical Expressions in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats
- General agreement that defining an indicator to signify whether the numeric designation refers to the work or expression is not appropriate for the Authority Format, since the data should match the type of entity that the record is for. However, it could be defined for the Bibliographic Format. There is recent precedent for defining such indicator values in the Bibliographic but not the Authority Format with the 046 field.
- From the pre-meeting comments, an excellent point was raised about providing an example for a numeric designation of a musical work to fully demonstrate the new indicator values.
- The other pre-meeting questions raised, including the RSC’s unlikeliness to approve new identifier subtypes, were discussed, and at this time do not appear to impede the development of this discussion paper into a proposal.

Discussion Paper No. 2023-DP06: Adding Subfield $3 to Field 532 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
- MAC voted to turn this discussion paper into a fast-track proposal

Subfields $0 and $1
- Uncertainty about the different use cases of subfields $0 and $1 arose in conversations about several of the discussion papers.
- The application of these subfields in various MARC fields has developed somewhat inconsistently since the subfields were first introduced
- General agreement that developing best practices for these fields does not fall under MAC’s purview.
- Other bodies which specialize in dealing with URIs may convene to bring some guidance and clarity on the situation to MAC and the rest of the community.

CATALOGING and METADATA COMMITTEE