Chris White (Chris.White@mail.bl.uk) asked:
>There was silence on the topic of the glyph / displayed character in
>printed MARC records. We want to get away from using the dollar
>currency symbol for this. What are other MARC record people using /
>going to use ? ?
As John Cowan and John Clews pointed out, the choice of a glyph (to
indicate the position of the Unit Separator) is a local choice.
The Library of Congress documentation for USMARC does not name the glyph,
but merely shows it. For example, the USMARC Format for Bibliographic Data
says:
A subfield code consists of a delimiter (ASCII 1F), represented in this
document as a <glyph>, followed by a data element identifier.
LC's glyph (as Gary Smith wrote) most closely resembles the image for
U+01C2, LATIN LETTER ALVEOLAR CLICK.
The subfield delimiter symbol is often referred to as "double dagger".
Walt Crawford (in "MARC for Library Use: Understanding Integrated USMARC")
wrote:
This book (and most USMARC documentation) uses the double dagger <glyph>
to indicate the subfield delimiter. The subfield delimiter is sometimes
shown as $ when no double dagger is available in a character set.
The implementations with which I am familiar (and Crawford's book) use a
sans-serif design for the glyph representing the subfield delimiter.
The separation of the horizontal lines varies (compare the image for U+01C2
to the double dagger in a sans serif font such as Arial).
The subfield delimiter symbol in the LucidaSans RLG font (designed by
Bigelow & Holmes) has the horizontal lines more separated than in LC
documentation, but less so than in the Arial double dagger.
Did the CHASE Project make any recommendation about a preferred glyph to
indicate the presence of U+001F?
Chris White continued:
>A further thought is that it will need to be something that our
>cataloguers can easily input via the keyboard when they are editing a
>record.
This is an implementation-specific choice.
The RLIN Terminal for Windows software puts the subfield delimiter symbol
on the minus key of the numeric keypad. (Our intent was to have it in a
fairly obvious position.)
The British Library uses RLIN for the English Short Title Catalogue, so you
can take a look at the LucidaSans RLG glyph, and see what you think about
our key position choice.
-- Joan Aliprand
Senior Analyst, Research Libraries Group
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