As of February 2023, CUL’s physical materials collections comprises of almost 10 million items. Reporters often need to be able to select, group and/or count resources based on material format (such as books, serials, cartographic materials, visual materials, etc.), and CUL is asked to report on collection holdings locally and nationally each fiscal year. At CUL, for physical resources, material formats or classifications are currently* based on the codes catalogers assign to each resource’s bibliographic record as it is cataloged. Catalogers follow multiple standards including the MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) standard. The basic classification is based on a combination of the MARC bibliographic record’s leader/06 and leader/07 values; other coding can be used to further break down classifications.
Prior to July 2021, CUL used the Voyager Library Integrated System to manage its materials inventory. The Voyager system contained a built-in table for classifying materials (called the Voyager Bib Format Display Table), which translated each combination of the MARC bibliographic record’s leader/06 and leader/07 values to a more generalized format. However, the Voyager table was not created by CUL, and did not include additional valid 06 and 07 value combinations Cornell made use of over the years.
In July 2021, CUL moved from the Voyager Library System to the FOLIO Library Services Platform. This has given us the opportunity to review CUL’s physical materials classification system (the Voyager Bib Format Display Table), make relevant changes, and share these details with all CUL staff. This revised table, called the CUL FOLIO Physical Material Bib Format Display Table, contains three levels of materials classifications (also known as bib formats): a general classification (column h); an additional grouping for CUL’s annual data collection reporting (column i); and a further grouping for national reporting (column j). The table has been created in consultation with cataloging and metadata subject matter experts at CUL. The CUL FOLIO Physical Material Bib Format Display Table contains suggested formats for CUL users, and users may need to use different formats based on specific needs.
To maintain continuity when providing material counts, all efforts have been made to remain as close as possible to the original Voyager classification. Changes have been made where necessary to ensure accuracy going forward.
*Note that in the future, there will be cataloged records in FOLIO that do not have underlying MARC records. CUL will be working to define how to categorize formats via Inventory fields and their coding.
Main changes as compared to the Voyager Format Translation Table:
Based on the MARC Leader 06 and 07 values, the following changes have been made to the revised FOLIO Physical Material Bib Format Display Table, as seen when comparing Columns G (Voyager Format Type) and H (FOLIO Revised Format Type) in the table:
Historical conventions about the classifications in the Voyager table, which will continue to be followed in the FOLIO table:
Historical conventions about the classifications in the Voyager table, which will NOT continue to be followed in the FOLIO table:
Additional historical conventions about classifications in the Voyager table for the purposes of Annual Data Collection (based on specifications from the agencies to which CUL reports), which will continue to be followed when creating reports for the annual data collection:
(See Column I, FOLIO Revised Format Type - further grouping for CUL Annual Data Collection purposes)
Additional historical conventions about classifications for the purposes of reporting to ACRL/NCES (based on ACRL/NCES specifications), which will continue to be followed when creating reports for those agencies:
(See Column J, FOLIO Revised Format Type - further breakdown for ACRL/NCES reporting purposes)
Additional Classifications: Subsets of Main Material Types
Specific material types such as microforms, videos and specific types of sound recordings, are subsets of the main material formats identified via the Leader 06 and 07 codes. Once the main material types have been identified using the Leader codes, values in an additional MARC field (the MARC 007 fixed field) can be used to further classify the materials. A further level of material information, such as ‘carrier’ information (audio disk, video disk, computer disc, audio reel, etc.) is also available via the 3XX MARC fields, but is not as commonly used.
The main 007/00 field values of interest are:
‘h’ = microform
‘s’ = sound recording, with a 007/01 of, for example, ‘s’ for ‘sound cassette
‘v’ = video recording
For example, a material that contains ‘a’ in the leader 06 field and ‘m’ in the leader 07 field is classified as a ‘book’ as its main material type. However, if it also has a value of ‘h’ in the 007 fixed field, it is a book which is in microform format, and is therefore counted as a ‘microform’. Video recordings and specific types of sound recordings are identified in a similar way via a combination of the leader field codes and the 007/00 fixed field codes.
CUL-Specific Identification of Microforms
Due to changing cataloging standards as well as historic conventions, three approaches need to be used to identify microforms are identified in a way that is unique to CUL. Along with including materials that are classified as ‘h’ in the 007/00 fixed field, we also include all items that contain any of the following terms in the call number - ‘micro’, ‘film’, ‘fiche’, ‘Micro’, ‘Film’, ‘Fiche’ – or that contain the term ‘microform’ in the title.
In the past, if a microform duplicated an existing physical title, a separate cataloging record was not created for it; the aforenoted terms were simply added either to the call number. Thus, the microform record would lack the ‘h’ in the 007/00 fixed field, as the same instance record (cataloging record) was used for both the physical item as well as the microform item. However, if there was no previously existing instance record and a new record was created for the microform, then it would contain at least an ‘h’ in the 007/00 fixed field. As a result, at CUL the most accurate way to identify microforms is to include materials based on the 007/00 fixed field value as well as the title and call number fields.
It must be noted that the elements sometimes show contradictory information for microform type; we do not attempt to reconcile the differences.
Links to MARC Documentation