Eric,

This is definitely not a feature of MARC but rather a feature of your local
ILS (Aleph 500).  Those are local fields for which you'd need to make a
translation to a standard MARC field if you wanted to move that information
to another system that is based on MARC.

Steve

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> 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
>