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.

For archaeological site reports, does information as to the type of site report (i.e. "final report" or "preliminary report") go in the bibliographic record? If so, is this information coded to allow computer retrieval of these records?

There is a separate note field in cataloging that is used for the type of report. This is the 513 field in MARC. This field is named the "Type of Report and Period Covered Note." The first subfield is for the "type of report" and the second subfield is for the "period covered."

For example:
513: : $a Final report; $b May-Sept. 1997.
This is a note field and can probably be keyword searched in many library computer catalogs.

In MARC records, there is also a section of "fixed fields." These computer fields contain coded information which can be used by a computer to pull and sort the records. A commonly used "fixed field" (named such because they are not free text fields, but fields of fixed length, with set codes to input) is the language field. For example, the language field contains "eng" if the book is in English, and if your computer system can search and/or sort records using this field, you can search for books on a given topic, or by a given author, in English.

For archaeological site reports, there are a few "fixed fields" available for coding information about these reports. The fact that the report is a technical report can be coded by putting "t" in the 008/positions 24-27. Although this field allows the cataloger to specify that the work is a technical report, it does not let you specify what kind of report (i.e. "final," "interim," etc.) There are also "fixed fields" for the date of publication. For most books, these fields contain the year of publication, but for archaeological reports this date can be expanded to include the month and day of the report, if necessary. For example, if the report was issued in "Nov. 1978," the "fixed field" would be coded as O08/position 06 "e" (for detailed date), 008/positions 7-10 "1978" (for the year), and 008/positions 11-14 "11" (for the month). Again, these fields are used by computer systems to search and/or sort records.

Finally, I should add, that some of this information (especially for old bibliographic records) may be in general notes (MARC field 500), instead of the specific technical report note (MARC field 513).