Kia ora koutou,

The Oceania RDA Committee (ORDAC) are involved in some thinking about how an organised people group such as iwi and hapū fit into the RDA Agent entity structure (and other collectives that currently don’t “fit” as Families or Corporate Bodies), and how they and their relationships to resource entities (WEMI) can be described.

Relatedly, MARC encoding has similar inadequacies which would be very good to have resolved. Having these inadequacies addressed involves writing a proposal paper to be submitted to the MARC Advisory Committee (a.k.a. a MAC paper).

Here’s a summary of what the MAC paper would be exploring and proposing (much text supplied by Charlotte Christensen 😊)

The proposal would be request placement in MARC to accommodate Agent and Collective Agent entries in MARC bibliographic and authority records.

Currently MARC bibliographic has:

• X00 for Person and Family (using indicator 1 to differentiate – 1 or 0 for person, 3 for family)
• X10 for Corporate Body

There are some situations where:

• The name recorded represents a group of people that doesn’t fit the definition of either Family or Corporate Body
• We don’t know whether the name recorded represents an individual person or group of people.

Examples include:

• Diamond Field – is this a name for a single musician or a musical group?
• Joint pseudonyms where the involved authors acknowledge that they are using a single name, e.g. Erin Hunter
• Groupings of people which are neither Corporate Bodies nor fit the Western concept of “Family”, e.g. Māori iwi and hapū, or other Indigenous communities.

Current practice is to treat scenarios like joint pseudonyms as single Persons in order to fit them into one of the MARC encoding options, and to use notes to acknowledge the relationship to an Indigenous community or group (e.g. for a collection of traditional stories compiled by an iwi), or to squeeze an authorized access point for the group into Corporate Body encoding (fudging it, so to speak).

Having separate MARC tags and/or other coding to clearly identify these scenarios would better serve cataloguers and end users, and make it clearer what type of Agent is being referenced or described.

We are looking for help with this project 😊 If you have a particular interest and/or expertise in MARC, and you’re interested in getting involved in the process of writing a MAC paper then please do let me know! If you know someone who might be, feel free to forward the information.

If you would like to know more about it then also do get in touch.

Ngā mihi nui,

Bridget

Bridget Jennings

CatSIG Rep on ORDAC

bridget.jennings@wcc.govt.nz