Publications and Bibliographies

If you have any comments or suggestions about these informational postings, or any questions on cataloging which you would like answered, please send them to the Subject and Bibliographic Access Committee. The Committee is always looking for more questions for this monthly column.

Are funding agencies for archaeological digs cited and/or traced in the cataloging record?

If the funding agency is named prominently on the piece (usually meaning on the title page), then they are probably cited on the cataloging record.

There are a number of places that a funding agency can be cited on a cataloging record. Usually they are listed in a general note (MARC field 500), or as a publisher (MARC field 260).

There is also a MARC field that is used ONLY FOR FUNDING INFORMATION. This is the 536 field and it is a "Funding information note." The field is broken down into various subfields for the different types of funding numbers as follows:

$a Text of note
$b Contract number
$c Grant number
$d Undifferentiated number
$e Program element number
$f Project number
$g Task number
$h Work unit number

An example is:
536 ## $a Sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency through the Office of Naval Research $b N00014-68-A-0245-0007 $c ARPA Order No. 26.

If your library uses this field, and your computer system can search and/or qualify searches by subfield, you can retrieve information on grant numbers, etc. from the catalog record. In most cases the funding agency is also given an added entry as a corporate author on the record, and can therefore be searched as an author in your OPAC.