Iva Pribramska, System librarian, The National Library of the
Czech Republic
Background:
Althoug Unimarc is first of all an exchange format, using it as
an internal data structure prevents the necessity of data
conversion resulting usually in some loss of data. Since
international cooperation is important for the library,
cataloguers have to accept it.
Introduction:
Implementation of "full" Unimarc in Aleph should mean not only
the possibility to enter all data in requested form (with
indicators, all kinds of subfields, fixed fields, linking entry
fields and without lenght limit), but also to retrieve all
entered information that library wishes to retrieve and to
display and print records in the form requested by international
standards and recomendations (e.g. ISBD) and all this without
duplication or even triplication of data. This should be the
final stage but we can accept realization step by step.
Current problems:
a) indicators
for Aleph it is no special category - the 3rd dimension
of data; sometimes they are treated as a part of a field
tag, sometimes as a part of a field text,
they cannot influence searching the data although
sometimes they are used in Unimarc to distinguish whether a
content of a field should or should not be searchable;
b) subfields
numeric subfields cannot be retrieved online,
some functions do not work with subfields (e.g. UTIL
52),
fixed forms cut data from other subfields of a field
that are not listed in them;
c) fixed fields
it is not possible to retrieve and to display or print
specific code from specific position, (Ex Libris promises
support for data entry);
d) linking entry fields
it is not possible to differentiate between the same
subfield from different fields entered there and send them
to the different access files (e.g. 200$$a to TI, WTI,
700$$a to AU, WAU),
it is not possible to display this fields with more
complex structure ("record in record") in the form of
bibliographic record.
This list may not be complete. We are only at the very beginnig
of using Aleph for real production, so we expect some problems
remain still hidden.