Paul POULAIN said:
Russel Garlick a écrit :
So I guess we are asking the same questions as Joshua. If someone can define exactly what MARC compliant serials are, that would be great.
+1. I would be pleased to have a librarian explaining how to manage serials in MARC21. In UNIMARC too also, as afaik, there are no specific fields for serials in UNIMARC
There are a few special fields in a MARC bibliographic record that are important for serials, especially the ISSN field (022 in MARC 21, 011 in UNIMARC) and the Key Title field (222 in MARC 21, 530 in UNIMARC). These are important because serials are notorious for changing their titles over the course of their publication history. But the really interesting MARC stuff pertaining to serials (for our purposes, anyway) happens in the MARC holdings records. If you look at the Captions and Patterns fields (853-855 in MARC 21, 500-502 in UNIMARC) and the Enumeration and Chronology fields (863-865 in MARC 21, 510-512 in UNIMARC) you'll see a lot of complex ways to define publication frequency, numbering patterns, etc., very similar to the type of information we're currently storing in the Koha "serial" table. (see http://www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/echdhome.html and http://www.ifla.org/VI/8/projects/UNIMARC-HoldingsFormat04.pdf) The "Holy Grail" of serials management for libraries is an easy-to-use software that: 1) describes the publication in general terms (and keeps track of name changes); 2) warns the librarian when issues are missing or late; and 3) allows adding of issues with item information that is detailed enough to identify the item by barcode _and_ date (without creating a separate MARC record for each issue). I don't know of *anyone* who's come up with a really good system for this. Maybe the law library Joshua has been talking with has _lots_ of money? -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com