I never could believe there was ever any mandated terminating punctuation
for any field or subfield since even computers from days of yore could
handle this.

I am leery of relying on fixed fields as they often are not encoded
correctly -- I'd guess electronic records encoded as paper cause headaches
for more than a few people here.

There is also the issue of updating systems to behave correctly in response
to a field definition. For decades, the MARC format and cataloging practice
have supported the ability to use fixed fields alone to limit searches to
Festschrifts containing facscimilies and comics supported by an index and
bibliography on tangible but unspecified electronic media -- but to my
knowledge no system exploits this power :)

kyle



On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Presumably you could check the appropriate leader element:
>
> "In 2010, MARBI (Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee)
> approved MARC proposal no. 2010-07 submitted by the Deutsche
> Nationalbibliothek to add a code to Leader/18 (Descriptive Cataloging Form)
> to indicate the omission of ISBD punctuation in MARC 21 records."
>
> Roy (who can't believe that we're finally doing this)