Question: What is going on with all the new fields I am seeing on authority records?
Answer: The new fields on authority records are the 046, the 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 380, 381, 382, 383 and 384. (A whole bunch of new tags to learn. Thank goodness, not all of the new fields appear on or are required on every record). They have been authorized for over a year, but we are starting to see more and more of them in the NAF.
Sometimes these fields appear on a new "born RDA" record--an RDA authority record with |e rda in the 040 and DCF "z" in the fixed fields. Sometimes the new fields have been added to a regular AACR2 record that already existed. For an example, look at the authority record for Ho Chi Minh. It's a longstanding AACR2 record with a new 046, 370, 374, 375 and 377.
Question: What is the purpose of these new fields?
Answer: The new fields are intended to be used to make data more retrievable by computers. Some of the data is simply a coded form of information that we have always recorded in the 670. For example, Ho Chi Minh's dates have always been in his heading, |d 1890-1969, with justification of the dates down in the 670. But computers have trouble pulling the dates out of the heading. The 046 field presents the dates in a coded format for future computer use. Subfield f of the 046 is defined as the birth date of a person and subfield g as the death date. Ho Chi Minh's 046 appears as "|f 18900519 |g 19690902."
Some of the new fields add information that we might or might not have recorded in the 670. Ho Chi Minh's place of birth and death are recorded in a new 370 on his authority record; his gender, "male" is recorded in the new 375 field. All of these fields are intended to allow users to do searches pulling up categories of people in any combination they can imagine---twentieth century female revolutionaries, perhaps, or everybody associated with Ho Chi Minh's home town, or who knows what.
Question: How can I gain mastery of these new fields?
Answer: In the Cataloging and Metadata Services meeting on Tuesday, July 19, I will be passing out a 1-page cheat sheet for the new authority records along with more samples of authority records. The cheat sheet is also in RDA Toolkit. Once you have logged in to the Toolkit, it appears on the middle Tools tab, under Workflows – Shared Workflows – Cornell: Cheat Sheet for the New Authorities Fields. The Toolkit version of the cheat sheet has hyperlinks to the official MARC21 Format for Authority Data, the only source we have so far on how to apply the new fields. The Cornell cheat sheet is highly unofficial, incomplete, and may be wrong, since we pretty much made it up based on what we've seen so far and what the MARC21 documentation says. However, you can use it to get started with figuring out what the new fields mean. You might want to use the Toolkit workflow to puzzle through the rest of Ho Chi Minh's authority record as practice before the meeting.
Question: Am I supposed to be adding these new fields to my authority records?
Answer: For right now, keep doing authority work as you always have. Do not add these fancy new fields to your records. We are awaiting guidelines from the PCC and a greater consensus in the cataloging world about best practices for their use. Most of the fields are not "core" and therefore will not be required when creating new authority records. However, we cannot continue to ignore the fields. When you come across one, study it. We are all going to have to learn this stuff and apply it to our own work.