Lesson 6 - Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC)

Part A:

I found all the marc records for each of the books; the MARC record for Nick Sharratt's book, Muddlewitch Does Magic Tricks, took me quite a while to find. I went over each title page and verso. I did this before I read the assigned reading, but it seemed to make sense to me. I tried to find each item on the title page or verso. I still have questions about a few lines in each MARC records. I finally found some quiet time to make sense of the readings. I took the first book, The Tale of Despereaux, and made notes on the MARC record as I read over the material. Ready to give an attempt.

Part B:
See, Lisa. (2005). Snow flower and the secret fan. New York: Random House.

My version of a MARC record:

020 $a9780812968064 (pbk.)
092 01 $aSEE
100 1 $aSee, Lisa.
245 10 $a Snow flower and the secret fan : $ba novel / $cLisa See.
260 $aNew York : $bRandom House Trade Paperbacks, $c2005.
300 $a269p. ; $c21 cm.
520 $aA story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
650 0 $aReminiscing in old age $vFiction.
650 0 $aFemale friendship $vFiction.
650 0 $aWomen $zChina $vFiction.
650 0 $aMarried women $vFiction.
650 0 $aOlder women $vFiction.
650 0 $aFootbinding $vFiction.
650 0 $aChildbirth $vFiction.
650 0 $aSecrecy $vFiction.
650 0 $aChina $vFiction.
651 0 $aChina $vFiction.

MARC record:
020 $a9780812968064 (pbk.) is actually
020 $a1400060281 (alk. paper) --I could not find this ISBN number in the book.

260 I included Trade Paperbacks; it is ommitted from the MARC record. The mark record has $cc2005--I only put one c.

300 MARC record has a different physical description than I did--300 $a258p. ; $c25 cm.

The MARC record did not include the 520 tag at all.

I have no idea what 596 $aBHBR means; I also looked for those letters in The Tale of Despereaux and could not find them.

650 tags are correct, except that I forgot the letter v for Fiction and z for China. I had to look them up.

I did not include tags 010 035 082 655 655 and 948.

I wrote the MARC record out on a piece of paper before typing it out here. There are many rules for each tag, first and second indicators, and delimiters. It makes sense to me that it is a lot shorter and takes up less space by using symbols rather than writing the whole word out, such as tag 260: place of publication, publisher, and year of publication. I can also see how knowing the tag helps the teacher-librarian search for items for students. For instance, since my books are organized by genre, I would check the 650 tags before going to a certain genre to find a book. In order to tackle assignment 2, I need a template of the most-used tags etc. I see that I better get cracklelacken.

What I found from searching the information on the title page and the verso is that it is not easy to find MARC records for each book. Also, there are several places to find MARC records. It is impossible for one place to house all the MARC records for every book. There is also a lot to MARC records that I did not find on the tile pages or the verso. As creating MARC records is so time-consuming, I am glad we have a DRC because I am not sure how One caould find the time to do this and the many other tasks that a TL is required to do.