Hi,

I have a question concerning the proper coding of the 130 field (Main
Entry-Uniform Title).

Concerning the first indicator of the 130 field, OCLC's bibliographic
formats and standards tells us to use zero, with the note: "Current
practice is to enter the title without articles and use 1st indicator
value 0." When cataloging on OCLC we will continue to follow this
convention.

We are trying to decide whether to follow this practice in our local
Voyager catalog. Voyager handles the field as MARC21 says it should,
indexing the 130 depending on the value of the first indicator.  We are
considering making a global change which would set this value to zero and
remove the corresponding initial articles from all 130s in our catalog,
but are not sure if we should do so. We have a significant number of 130s
with non-zero first indicators in our catalog that are correctly coded;
we've already cleaned up the ones which were incorrect. Should we make
this global change? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks
Jack

Jack D. Fitzpatrick
Cataloging Dept.
Auburn University Libraries
http://www.auburn.edu/~fitzpjd
fitzpjd@auburn.edu
334-844-0777