RE: 246 and 490 1 display

["Paul Burry" <burryp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quite apart from your systems/display issues, I would urge caution when deleting MARC fields from records. 246s are traced in the title index because they are variant forms of the 245 by which patrons are likely to search for desired items. Since there is no "authority control" for 245s, 246s are vital for tracing variant forms of the 245. Regardless of how they may affect multi-title displays in your OPAC, deleting them will definitely hinder patron retrieval. One rule of thumb I have learned: don't monkey with the MARC to overcome systems limitations unless absolutely unavoidable.

On the other hand, I would not include 490s in your title index, nor would I have them display in your OPAC (although that is perhaps more a matter of personal preference). Including 490s in the title index causes all kinds of chaos with OPAC retrieval/display, something to which I can testify from current experience. I suppose, in a perfect world, one would hope to have a series authority with a 4xx reference from every variant form (490) of all your series titles (sadly, not the case for me).

Good luck!
Regards,

Paul Burry
Library Technical Assistant (Cataloguing)
University of Northern British Columbia
library.unbc.ca
250.960.6499

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Nae Hyun Kim [mailto:nkim@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent:	Friday, September 19, 2003 12:53 PM
To:	innopac@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject:	246 and 490 1 display

Our innopac displays 490 1 when you do a title search. Does is suppose 
to? I thought it was only for the sake of transcription that we enter 
the varied form of titles. Since authority records take care of 
referencing the users to look up by the correct form, it is only 
confusing and misleading to have results on your browse list under 
varied forms, because the # of hits varies too depending on how it 
appears on the items.

I've been doing away with 246 for the same reason. When you do a search 
by the 246 title, your result reflects only the items that have that 
form of title in addition to the see reference.

Is there a way to suppress certain variable fields?

Naehyun Kim
Manhattan School of Music


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