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MARC: News and Announcements (May 31, 2013)

MARC and RDA Relators Reconciled

Network Development and MARC Standards Office
Library of Congress

The MARC Code List for Relators is a list of terms with their associated codes to allow the relationship between a name and a resource (i.e. roles) to be designated in bibliographic descriptions. The list has been used for many years in MARC and more recently in MODS. In MARC the term is carried in subfield $e in name and subject fields and in the code form in subfield $4. This list has been useful more broadly than just in the MARC community; in 2005 an agreement to use a subset of these roles as subproperties of Dublin Core Contributor was established between LC and DCMI. With the publication of RDA another list of roles showing the relationship between a person, family or organization and a resource was made available in Appendix I. The RDA list only includes English language terms and not codes. There is a great deal of overlap between the MARC and RDA lists, although they are presented differently.

The MARC Code List for Relators has been available for many years, initially in print and then on the web in HTML on the MARC site. For several years a richer dataset has been available at http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators.html as Linked Data. This revision is reflected in the HTML pages on the MARC site, but its most complete form is at id.loc.gov, using the relationships available in RDF.

The Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress conducted a thorough comparison of the MARC and RDA lists that resulted in a major revision of the MARC Code List for Relators. For consistency, this announcement refers to these designators as “roles”; in MARC they are “relators” and in RDA they are “relationship designators”. This revision reconciles the two lists in several ways:

• Codes have been assigned to all terms.
• Roles that essentially mean the same thing but use different terms have been brought together, either using the MARC term or the RDA term. Many role terms were the same, but when they differed the RDA term was preferred in many cases. In the cases where the terms were different there are references in the form of alternate labels from the unused form and they are designated in terms of their source, MARC or RDA.
• Where the RDA term was used instead of the MARC term, the code was retained unchanged even if it is no longer mnemonic.
• All definitions have been revised, at the very least to attain consistent style (e.g., change “Use for a person or organization …” to “A person or organization …”). Frequently the definitions are based on the RDA definition. The definitions of some roles have been checked against other sources, such as for moving images and the Glossary of Filmographic Terms made available by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAT).
• Where RDA had separate terms designating FRBR level (e.g,. composer and composer (expression)) the revised list includes only one term without the designation of level as part of the term. As noted below, RDA's FRBR levels for terms are indicated via Collections, thus the single term would be designated as belonging to all appropriate levels (e.g., work and expression in the example).

Other changes and enhancements to the list include:

• The list includes relationships between terms (broader and narrower in terms of properties/subproperties). Most of these were derived from RDA Appendix I.
• RDA/FRBR Levels and BIBFRAME Levels have been indicated via Collections. In the case of BIBFRAME these should be considered preliminary and subject to change as BIBFRAME evolves.
• Where the RDA term did not have an equivalent in the MARC list, it has been added and assigned a code. Thirty-eight codes have thus been added to the MARC Relator list and two MARC codes have been deprecated, as they were found to be redundant. The announcement at http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/tn130531rel.html lists the new and the deprecated codes.
• Collection is also used to specify the subset of the list that is included in RDA Appendix I.
• Collections are used to indicate which general role type the role is associated with in the RDA list, i.e. Creator, Contributor, Manufacturer, Publisher, Distributor, Owner, Other.

The publication of this revision will facilitate use of a broader set of roles than had previously been available in MARC and in other carrier formats. In assigning codes to all of the RDA roles, institutions may continue to use coded data if they choose for this information.

The list is available at: http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators and at http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators.

Please send comments to: ndmso@loc.gov

May 31, 2013

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