Call me by multiple surnames: X00 first indicator 2
X00 fields, used for individual personal names in both bibliographic and authority records, used to have separate first indicators defined for single and multiple forenames. Today, the indicators are: 0) Forename, 1) Surname, and 3) Family name. But until 1996, they were: 0) Forename, 1) Single surname, 2) Multiple surname, and 3) Family name.
(Did you know that you can see what fields, subfields, and indicators used to be valid on the bottom of most pages of the MARC specification? Because you totally can!)
The rationale for encoding single surnames and multiple surnames differently was that certain filing rules handle names with multiple surnames differently. The different indicators went all the back to the MARC II standard from 1968 (at least according to a 1996 report), making me feel like the importance of filing rules is a holdover from a time when MARC was as much about creating catalog cards and printed library catalogs as anything else.
However, the separate indicators became a problem when the British Library and the Library of Congress started exchanging name authority records in 1994, as part of NACO. At the time, the British Library was using UKMARC, and LC was using USMARC. Both had first indicator values defined for single and multiple surnames, but the two communities used them in different ways. USMARC had a fairly confusing set of rules about when to consider something a multiple surname, depending on the type of element included in a multi-part surname and how many parts made up the whole name, while UKMARC… only cared about whether the surname had more than one part. Obviously, that led to some discrepancies. For example, UKMARC treated the name “Walter de la Mar” as having multiple surnames (first indicator 2), while USMARC treated it as a single surname (first indicator 1), because the elements that make the surname more than one part are a preposition and an article.
When the issue became apparent, the USMARC Advisory Group started looking into it, and discovered that very few systems actually used the first indicator for making a sorting distinction between the two types of surnames. So, rather than either side changing their encoding practices for multiple surnames, the distinction was eliminated altogether. USMARC got rid of it in 1996 - first indicator value 2 was rendered obsolete, and value 1 was redefined as just “Surname.” Although I can’t confirm for sure, UKMARC seems to have made the same change (see, for example, the last published version of UKMARC’s definition of field 100). So even though the British Library (and by extension, much of the UK library community) didn’t move from UKMARC to MARC 21 until 2004, differences between the two formats were being reconciled well before that - in this case, due to shared authority projects.
In a twist, the Library of Congress didn’t actually implement the change until 2000. When they did, the decision was to encode new bib and authority records correctly, but only to change old records when those records were touched for some other reason. Presumably by now, all the records with first indicator 2 have been changed - I assume that LC and OCLC have done some mass updating of that by now. But it doesn’t seem impossible that the old surname encoding is still hanging around in various local systems.
It turns out there is a field specifically for imprint statements for films, with dedicated subfields for producing company and releasing company. And it goes waaaay back, to AACR1, pre-1976.
Before 1976, AACR apparently instructed catalogers to create an imprint statement for films that is totally different than for books. And that went into MARC 261. In addition to subfields for producing and releasing company, it also has one for “contractual producer,” a category I’m not sure I understand (since I haven’t yet gotten my hands on a pre-1976 copy of AACR). The order of the subfields is different than 260, as well - for example, the place of production, release, etc. is 261 $f, as opposed to 260 $a. Additionally, the subfields for date and place are repeatable, if there are multiple producing companies, releasing companies, and contractual producers recorded (which is a total nightmare for thinking about translating that data). Here’s the actual field definition:
261 IMPRINT STATEMENT FOR FILMS (PRE-AACR 1 REVISED) (NR)
Indicators - Both undefined, contain blanks.
Subfield Codes
$a Producing company (R)
$b Releasing company (primary distributor) (R)
$d Date of production, release, etc. (R)
$e Contractual producer (R)
$f Place of production, release, etc. (R)
$6 Linkage (NR)
$8 Field link and sequence number
Then, when ISBD released a full specification for moving images in 1975, AACR was revised to match it. Thus, the 1976 AACR revision made imprint statements for films the same as for other materials and put them into the 260. The contractual producer was recognized as equivalent to a manufacturer, and went into 260 $f. The production company and releasing company were considered publishers, and went into 260 $b.
So why is 261 still around, if the cataloging rules haven’t called for it since 1976? Well, CAN/MARC, the Canadian version of MARC, got rid of 261 in 1988, but USMARC hung onto it. Which was fine, until the two countries started bringing their MARC formats together in the 1990s, into what would become MARC 21 (published in 1999). During this process of aligning the two standards, discrepancies between USMARC and CAN/MARC had to be reconciled. (See “Superseded Documentation” in the intro to the bib format.)
Therefore, the Library of Congress proposed in 1998 to make 261 obsolete, along with a few other fields that were valid in USMARC but not CAN/MARC. (This was actually after the two standards were officially announced to be in harmony in July 1997, but, well, oops?) MARBI voted not to make the field obsolete, though. There were concerns that it might be necessary for retrospective conversion of pre-1975 records, since it would be too difficult to transform the imprint statements in those records into the format of 260. Instead, 261 (and the other fields that were included in the same proposal) became “local” fields in MARC21 - so they aren’t officially obsolete, but they are only valid in some contexts. A similar compromise had been made earlier for 9XX fields used in Canada - they weren’t considered valid fields in MARC21, but they were officially documented as part of the standard - so the same was done for 261.
Currently, 261 is listed in the content designator history for the 2XX block as “USMARC only,” and fully described in Appendix H: “Local/Obsolete Data Elements.” I’m not clear what the real difference is between making it “USMARC only” versus “obsolete,” since either way effectively no one is going to use it. Instead, it just lurks in the appendix, like a ghost haunting the hallways of our data standard. 👻
