Marc Utility - Using the Short title

In recent training courses and emails, a number have asked how to extract just the plain or abbreviated title from MARC data received from SCISWeb.

In other words, instead of seeing this:

They wish to see this:

You can achieve this by modifying the way the MARC utility processes tags.

Titles

A bibliographic title has many components and these are well defined by the US Library of Congress in their definition of the MARC format. It is therefore a little helpful to understand how title data are encoded.

Marc data is encoded using “tags” and “sub-fields”. You can see these tags and sub-fields after you process a record by clicking on the raw MARC data at the bottom of the detail screen.

The “tags” box shows what tags were seen by the MARC utility and were processed. Title tags are in the range 200-249. Here, you will see that the title is encoded as a 245 tag and has a number of components.

The Title of the book is “Maths Explorer 2” and “author” details include Alan Brighouse, David Godber and Peter Patilla. If you look closely, you will see an “a” before the title and a “c” before the people responsible for the publication.

According the Library of Congress,

• the “a” sub-field of the 245 tag is the title

• the “c” sub-field of the 245 tag is called the “statement of responsibility” (loosely, the people or entities who are responsible for the publication. It would be useful to have this data appear in the “Author” or “Illustrator” fields.

Adjusting Tag data

This is described in some detail on page 21 of the Marc Reader User Guide.

From the main menu of the Marc utility, click the Tag Definitions button to see a list of tags and then click the 245 tag.

You should notice that each subfield can be processed separately. This is achieved merely by entering the sub field name (letter or number) and specifying which field you want that subfield to go to.

In this case, you want the “c” sub-field to go to an author field. Because the author details are already included in the MARC data (using a 100 tag), we might put this data into a supplementary author field, such as the illustrator field. Simply choose Illustrator from the pop-up list:

If you would prefer that the MARC utility completely ignore the data, then specify no field in the sub-field thus:

If you would like punctuation or white space to appear before or after the field, enter that punctuation or white space in the prefix or suffix fields. This example puts that additional author information back into the Title field, and wraps it with parentheses with a space before the opening parenthesis and a space after the closing parenthesis.

The record thus processed (with the parentheses) would then look like:

(the trailing “/” on the title is an artifact of the cataloguing and would likely indicate that the full title attribution should be used - note that Athenaeum will ignore the “/” when searching).