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MARC Report 241
Background
In April 2013, the PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) released its final report on editing copied AACR records after RDA implementation, titled: “Report of the PCC Post-Implementation Hybrid Bibliographic Records Guidelines Task Group”.
In that report, PCC outlines both acceptable manual edits that will add RDA elements to copied AACR records and “Candidates For Machine Conversion Of Bibliographic Data Post-Rda Implementation Recommended Conversions” (p. 19-20)
Based on those recommendations, OCLC has announced (in it’s OCLC RDA Policy Statement, effective March 31, 2013) that, not only will hybrid AACR records be accepted on WorldCat, but, taking it one step further, OCLC will do “machine manipulation of existing WorldCat records” to bring legacy (AACR and pre-AACR) records to current practice (RDA).
“Anticipated changes include, but are not limited to:
- Adding 336, 337, 338 fields
- Spelling out non-transcribed abbreviations in 255, 300, 500, 504 and other fields
- Converting Latin abbreviations to English equivalents in 245, 260, and other fields
- Converting dissertation notes in 502 field to multiple subfields
- Removing GMDs (after 31 March 2016)
- Heading changes in accordance with RDA”
The bottom line is that it is no longer feasible or logical for catalogers to insist on keeping AACR records ‘pure’.
MARC Report 240
In our February 2013 MARC Report update (version 240), we added a long list of cataloging checks for possible RDA errors, and a shorter list of checks for newly possible AACR errors (for those catalogers who indicated that they wanted to keep doing ‘proper’ AACR).
This was before we learned about the PCC recommendations to hybridize AACR records for consistency with the new instructions.
MARC Report 241
Because of the PCC recommendations, we have added a new option to MARC Report 241, on the Cataloging Checks page: ‘Check for hybrid data in AACR’
How it works
If you select ‘Descriptive rules support: AACR only’, “hybrid checks” are automatically enabled (indicating that you wish to change everything in a record back to pure AACR).
If you select ‘Descriptive rules support: RDA only’, “hybrid” checks are automatically disabled.
If you select ‘Descriptive rules support: Follow 040’ (the program default), “hybrid” checks will be disabled by default, but you may optionally select (or deselect) the “hybrid checks” option.
When the “hybrid checks” option is not checked, and MARC Report encounters an AACR record that contains the kinds of RDA data outlined in the PCC report, the software will not warn you about this hybridization.
We highly recommend that you read both the PCC report and the OCLC Policy Statement, to understand the kinds of things that will be added to AACR records, manually and by machine conversion, and the reasoning behind this decision.
To view the cataloging checks that are governed by this option, browse the list of checks with modified_flags. Cataloging checks in this list that have had their flag changed to “None” will be the checks that are now considered “hybrid checks”.
