From the perspective of a programmer, rather than a cataloguer, my opinion is firmly no, HTML does not belong in your MARC records. 

In application development, general best practice is to separate information systems into layers, splitting data from "business logic" and "presentation logic". MARC stores data, and HTML belongs to presentation. Though it may sound like a good idea today to put HTML into a MARC record, that tag may be meaningless down the road when some other technology is used to present your record data. If you wish to present data in HTML, you are much better off leaving the HTML out of your MARC, and allowing the application to generate tags.


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries on behalf of Doran, Michael D
Sent: Sun 6/21/2009 1:12 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] HTML mark-up in MARC records
 
Is anybody else embedding HTML mark-up code in MARC records [1]?  We're currently including an "<img>" tag in some MARC Holdings records in the 856z [2].   I'm inclined to think that HTML mark-up does not belong anywhere in MARC records, but am looking for other opinions (preferably with the reasoning behind the opinions), both pro and con.  

I'm asking on code4lib as well as the voyager-l list in order to get a mix of ILS-specific and ILS-agnostic opinions (I'm not on any cataloging lists, or would probably ask there, too).  I tried googling this topic, but couldn't find anything of consequence; so if I've missed something there, and you could point me to it, I'd be obliged.

-- Michael

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

[2] http://www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/hd856.html
      
# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
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