I believe that alpha characters for field names ARE legal according to 
(most of the various) MARC standard(s). But they are not generally used 
in library MARC data.

Jonathan

Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> Are alpha characters used for field names valid in MARC records?
>
> When we do dumps of MARC records our ILS often dumps them with FMT and 
> CAT field names. So not only do I have glorious 246 fields and 100 
> fields but I also have CAT fields and FMT fields. Are these features 
> of my ILS -- extensions of the standard -- or really a part of MARC? 
> Moreover, does something like Marc4J or MARC::Batch and friends deal 
> with these alpha field names correctly?
>
> --Eric Lease Morgan
>

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu