SERIES FIELDS ON BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORDS

Anatomy of a series field:

Series fields on bibliographic records serve two basic purposes:

• Descriptive: stating the series title exactly as it appears on the piece.
• Access: create controlled index entries in Acorn; also called heading fields or series tracings

Descriptive fields:

These fields may have initial articles. There is no period at the end of this field.

490 0_ used when the series is untraced, i.e., does not index on Acorn (except in keyword). There is no accompanying 8xx field.
490 1_ used when the series is traced, but indexed differently; MUST be accompanied by an 8xx field
5xx used on reprints only

Access (Heading or Tracing) fields:

No initial articles in these fields (because they go into indexes). These fields end in a period, unless there is
another marking of ending punctuation, such as a parenthesis.

800 1_ (personal name/title) ex: Wordsworth, William,|d1770-1850.|tPoems
810 2_ (corporate name/title) ex: Sotheby's (Firm)|tCatalogues of sales
811 2_ (conference name/title) ex: Legislative Conference.|t Proceedings
830 _0 (title) ex: Collection Etudes juridiques comparatives

Access & Descriptive At The Same Time:

440 _x where x = indicator representing no. of characters for initial articles and space before title

440 _4 The annals of the XYZ Society
440 _0 Contributions of the XYZ Association
440 _3 La jolie serie

The text of descriptive fields on Acorn records should reflect exactly what is on the piece in hand and should not be edited (except for obvious typos), although series tag numbers, subfields, and captions may be changed. However the heading fields should be edited to match the series authority record. Each item in a series must have a descriptive field, but may or may not have an access field.
Troublespot: UKM records may lack a descriptive field, i.e., they just have an 830 with no accompanying 490 field. Just verify the 830 field.

Qualifiers (terms in parenthesis) should never appear in a descriptive field, as they are artificial cataloger additions to force correct sorting of items in a series.

Items may be published in multiple series, each of which will need verification.

RELATIONSHIP OF SERIES FIELDS TO AUTHORITY RECORDS:

Note the correspondence between bib record tagging and series authority record tagging:

 

WHAT TAGGING MEANS	AUTHORITY RECORD	BIB RECORD
130 = TITLES	130 _0 Collection Etudes juridiques comparatives	830 _0 Collection Etudes juridiques comparatives or: 440 _0 Collection Etudes juridiques comparatives
100 = PERSONAL AUTHOR/TITLES	100 1_ Wordsworth, William,|d1770-1850.|tPoems	800 1_ Wordsworth, William,|d1770-1850.|tPoems
110 = CORPORATE BODY/TITLES	110 2_ Sotheby's (Firm)|tCatalogues of sales	810 2_ Sotheby's (Firm)|tCatalogues of sales
111 = CONFERENCE NAME/TITLES	111 2_ Legislative Conference.|t Proceedings	811 2_ Legislative Conference.|t Proceedings

Note: the 2nd indicator value on the last 3 examples used to be 0, i.e, 100, 10, 110 10 and 111 20. These values were removed from authority and bib records on OCLC. Our older authority records still have them. When tagging new bib records, code for the new values, i.e, 810 1_ even if the authority record has 110 10.