Labelled View

MARC Report version 3 contains several views of each record: MARC (the standard editor), Text (a notepad-like editor), XML (an internet explorer view, useful for non-english script), and 'Labelled' (a view where MARC Tag numbers are replaced with labels or captions).

The initial purpose of Labelled view is to provide a generic, non-MARC interface to facilitate the data entry of a limited number of data elements, while preserving the capability to produce MARC records when the edit session is completed.

Future objectives of Labelled view are:

• support for loading data from other formats
• greater end-user customization of the display
• support for saving to other data formats (text, xml, etc)

Once these objectives are realized, this 'view' will likely be renamed to something like 'Meta view'.

The foundation of Labelled view is the label file that is used to map the tags in the MARC source data to more user-friendly captions.

When version 3 is installed, several of these label files will be added to the 'Templates' folder in your My Documents\MarcReport folder. These files are considered 'defaults'; they contain complete lists of MARC21 data elements.

The immediate goal of Labelled view, however, is to allow the user to create their own tag-to-label mapping¹⁾; and thus, the remainder of this section describes the format of these files.

Each row in a label file must contain five columns:

1. Tag – the MARC tag zero-filled to three bytes, eg. '001', '020', '650'
2. Type – a one byte code for the record/material type described by an 006, 007, or 008; the default value is '0'
3. Pos/Ind/Subf
   • for a control field, column 3 contains '00'
   • for a fixed field, column 3 contains the position of the element being described, zero-filled to two bytes, eg. '00', '15'
   • for a variable field, it contains '%1' for indicator 1, '%2' for indicator 2, or a one-byte (case-sensitive) subfield code.
4. Caption 1 – the label used to describe the MARC tag in column 1
5. Caption 2 – the label used to describe the data element in column 2

Each column must be separated by a tab character.

Any row that does not meet the above requirements will be silently ignored when the program loads the label file. By convention, if you wish to make 'comments' in the label file, begin the comment with a tab character.

A brief excerpt from the default labels file for bibliographic records follows:

020   0   %1   International Standard Book Number   First indicator:
020   0   %2   International Standard Book Number   Second indicator:
020   0   a    International Standard Book Number   International Standard Book Number
020   0   c    International Standard Book Number   Terms of availability
020   0   z    International Standard Book Number   Cancelled/invalid ISBN
020   a   6    International Standard Book Number   Linkage
020   a   8    International Standard Book Number   Field link and sequence number
...

View the default files (biblabels.txt or authlabels.txt) files distributed with the program for comprehensive examples.