Walter Lewis wrote:
> Perhaps what Erik's put his finger on here is as good an excuse as any
> to raise the Death To ISBD Punctuation banner one more time. Some
> 60s/70s field termination punctuation rules are at the heart of most of
> the crud you're trying to scrape off these records. If ever there was a
> set of encoding rules that were more misguided, I've been fortunate not
> to encounter them.
The problem is not ISBD punctuation (which is, after all, just semantic
markup for humans), but ISBD punctuation _embedded in_ MARC markup, which
means we've got two layers of markup intermingled. There's no reason to
store "semantic" punctuation when the semantic punctuation is clearly
implied by field or subfield delimiters.
But ISBD punctuation is really cool... especially if you've every looked at
an Asian or Cyrillic catalogue card and been able to identify the series
statement just from the punctuation.
- David
--
David J. Fiander
Digital Services Librarian
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