[Koha-devel] Re: MARC standards and North America

[paul POULAIN]

Pat Eyler wrote:

>>Friday, August 30, 2002    23:56 CDT
>>
>>Hey Koha folks,
>>
>>Just finished skimming through the transcript of the IRC mtg. and had one
>>minor correction to offer:
>>
>>MARC21 is the emergent *North American* standard and represents the
>>collaboration of LC and the NLC (National Library of Canada) in creating
>>the unified MARC21 out of differing practices in USMARC and CANMARC. This
>>is ongoing, of course (still hammering out things, as attested in AUTOCAT
>>listserv discussion on differing application of genre terms despite the
>>'decision' to adopt the Canadian codes, still resisted in practice by
>>former USMARCers).
>>
>>If you want to check on this, visit either the LC or NLC site for info the
>>history of MARC21 and you'll see that Paul was a little off in saying that
>>MARC21 was US only.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Steven F. Baljkas
>>lib. tech. lurker in Winnipeg, MB, Canada
>><baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca>
>>    
>>

Sorry if i made a mistake. It's really a pain to remind all those MARC 
sub-normas...

In fact, it may be a language problem : for us, in France, "Amerique", 
means "the north-american continent" (canada, USA, Mexique), and USA 
means ... USA. What is strange is that "Americains" means "ppl from 
USA", and we've no word for "ppl from north-america continent".
However, we usually prefer canadians, as some of them speak french (a 
strange french in fact, but a very nice french) ;-)
--
Paul