Please excuse any duplication

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NLM is proposing to discontinue distributing its bibliographic records
with artificially reconstructed subject strings.  Records will continue to
have MeSH headings combined with the appropriate topical subheadings, but
age group and pregnancy subdivisions, geographic locations, and
publication types would be in carried in separate fields in the record,
rather than as subfields of the MeSH heading.

This would mean that records distributed to bibliographic utilities and
other licensees would be identical to the records in LocatorPlus. NLM's
understanding is that many medical libraries would prefer to establish
their heading in the same manner that NLM does internally. Where libraries
are still using the complete subject string, they often are still making
local adjustments to the current strings to make them compatible with the
older headings in their databases, so they are not using the strings as
found in the utilities.

By no longer distributing reconstructed subject strings, NLM will be able
to streamline its cataloging process by avoiding the complex tagging
andcoding needed to properly reconstruct the strings on output.  This will
avoid the creation of sometimes nonsensical subject strings that
occasionally are automatically generated by the reconstruction program. In
the online environment, deconstructed subject headings provide more
simplicity and semantic interoperability.

Example:

Current licensee receive records with the following data:
650 _2 $a Main heading $x topical subheading $x age group $z geographic
location $v Publication Type/Genre $x language

In the future, distributed records would contain the following data:
650 _2 $a Main Heading $x topical subheading
650  2 $a Age group
651 _2 $a Geographic location $x topical subheading
655 _7 $a Publication Type/Genre $2 mesh

NLM is interested in hearing if libraries would like to continue to have
$x language appended to the subject string on distributed records when one
of the following publication types is used: Dictionary, Encyclopedias,
Phrases or Terminology.

The proposed change would be reflected in NLM bibliographic records
distributed to licensees and would begin to appear in bibliographic
utilities, e.g., OCLC, RLIN, in December 2005, when NLM resumes MARC
record distribution after internal year-end processing to implement MeSH
2006.

Please send comments on this proposal by August 15, 2005 to:

Diane Boehr
Head, Cataloging
National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike, Room 1N11
Bethesda, MD 20894
boehrd@mail.nlm.nih.gov

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Joanne Jahr
jjahr@nyam.org