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DATE: May 16, 2017
REVISED:
NAME: Rename and Broaden Definition of Field 257 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
SOURCE: Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC), Canadian Committee on Metadata Exchange (CCM)
SUMMARY: This paper proposes renaming and broadening the definition of field 257 (Country of Producing Entity) in the Bibliographic format so that jurisdictions that have strong film cultures and are often treated as countries can be used in this field, even if they are not legally recognized as countries.
KEYWORDS: Field 257 (BD); Country of producing entity (BD)
STATUS/COMMENTS:
05/16/17 – Made available to the MARC community for discussion.
06/24/17 – Results of MARC Advisory Committee discussion: Approved, with the amendment that the second sentence of the proposed subfield $a definition will be removed.
08/07/17 - Results of MARC Steering Group review - Agreed with the MAC decision.
Field 257 (Country of Producing Entity) is currently defined in the Bibliographic format as follows:
Field Definition and Scope:
Name or abbreviation of the name of the country(s) where the principal offices of the producing entity(s) of a resource are located. Entity(s) in this instance is the production company(s) or individual that is named in the statement of responsibility (subfield $c) of field 245 (Title Statement).Entity(s) in this instance is the production company(s) or individual that is named in the statement of responsibility (subfield $c) of field 245 (Title Statement).
Current definition of subfield $a:
$a - Country of producing entity
Name or abbreviation of the name of the country(s) where the principal offices of the producing entity(s) of a resource are located. May contain the abbreviation [S.l.] when the country is unknown.
Field 257 is used heavily by the film and video cataloging community to bring out the country where the production companies associated with a film are located. This information is an important part of film culture and is important information to communicate to library users. Information about the country of origin of films is commonly included in reference sources. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_films_by_country_of_production and http://www.imdb.com/country/.
Prior to 2010, field 257 was used only in archival cataloging based on information required by AMIM (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/chapter3.html). Therefore, most libraries used subject and later genre fields to bring out this information. Because this practice was “local,” catalogers had more flexibility to include entities that are treated as countries by film reference sources and award eligibility rules, but which are not formally recognized as countries by entities such as the U.S. government or the United Nations. Now that the 257 has taken the place of these local conventions, catalogers would like to be able to record these kinds of entities in field 257.
At this point we know of no other cataloging community using this field for identifying the country of production. In the future if additional usage is made of this field, the broadening of the definition of “country” will likely benefit them as well.
After presenting this proposal last year there were comments from MAC members that our previous approach of expanding the definition to include autonomous regions might have unwanted political ramifications. Because of this we’ve moved away from using that term at all. Instead we are recommending using the disclaimer that International Organization for Standardization (ISO) uses for their list of “Country Codes”, ISO 3166. The online browsing platform for this list is at https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:pub:PUB500001:en.
They use this disclaimer to avoid any unwanted political problems:
The designations employed and the presentation of material at this site do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
This proposal recommends that we do a similar thing in our definition of field 257. Namely allow users of MARC to use this disclaimer to indicate that we are not implying “any opinion” about the legal status of countries that might be allowed under this broader definition.
Very few changes to the format would be needed in order to allow more regions to be valid. The title of the field would need to be broadened and the “Field Definition and Scope” would need to be changed to indicate that no opinion on the status of the area was implied by its inclusion in this field. We recommend that field 257 be renamed: "Area of Producing Entity". There would be no cost associated with the change other than updating the documentation. Institutions or communities could decide under what conditions they would consider to use an area to be a useful determinate of where a film was produced based on the new name of the field.
257 ## $aPalestine. $2 naf
No impact
In Field 257 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format:
5.1. Rename field 257 and $a to be Area of Producing Entity:
5.2. Change definitions to:
Field Definition and Scope:
Name or abbreviation of the name of the country(s), areas, etc. where the principal offices of the producing entity(s) of a resource are located.Entity(s) in this instance is the production company(s) or individual that is named in the statement of responsibility (subfield $c) of field 245 (Title Statement).
The inclusion of countries, areas, etc. in this field does not express any opinion whatsoever concerning the legal status of the entity
$a - Area of producing entity
Name or abbreviation of the name of the country(s), areas, etc. where the principal offices of the producing entity(s) of a resource are located. May contain the abbreviation [S.l.] when the country, area, etc. is unknown.
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