MARS Authority Control

We have had a few other libraries ask about the Russian ligatures since there seems to be several inconsistencies with how these diacritics are coded in LC’s authority records.  A couple of months ago, one of our programmers was looking into this issue.  Here is the information that he found:

The reason why both the single ligature and the two half ligature’s are used is the LC records are inconstant in which ligature diacritics they use. We aren’t randomly changing them, we are exporting what’s in the LC record. I’ve only looked at a few records but this usually happens when OCLC updates a record. I’m pretty sure OCLC uses the two separate left and right half ligatures and LC uses the single combining ligature.

Here’s a direct quote from LC’s mapping table:

Code: The Ligature that spans two characters is constructed of two halves in MARC-8: EB (Ligature, first half) and EC (Ligature, second half).  The preferred Unicode/UTF-8 mapping is to the single character Ligature that spans two characters, U+0361.  The single character Ligature is encoded between the two characters to be spanned.

It specifically says the single ligature goes between the two characters that are supposed to be spanned.

LC’s mapping table can be downloaded here. It’s the MARC-8 to Unicode XML mapping file link:  http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/ … ables.html

So it looks like these Russian ligatures are being coded one way at LC and another way at OCLC.  The records that we receive are from LC.  As the records are changed from the single ligature to half ligatures (or vice verse), you will see them on the R03 change reports.

Tags: Bibliographic Records, UTF-8

This entry was posted on Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Authority Records, Automated Authority Control, Bibliographic Records, MARC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.