Fixing misuse of 246s; thoughts on ILS shortcomings.

Recently we have been tasked by our Library Director with fixing some past cataloging practices. In the past, our Catalogers helped our Special Collections department with highlighting local special collections in the catalog. I understand why they did what they did, but the method chosen was a flagrant violation of cataloging rules and misuse of MARC coding. Basically the 246 field (alternative title) was selected so that Special collection titles could be inserted here and would appear as an indexed, hyperlink-clickable title heading. It was a functional choice, a cheat, a short-cut. I understand completely why it was done.

In point of fact, the idea of local collections, near as I can tell, as such, falls through the specifications for existing MARC coding. I'm not opposed to the idea of having an clickable field in the OPAC display that is indexed and enables the user to access all the books in a local collection simultaneously in a results list. The problem is twofold. 1) there is no concise, already existing MARC tag that really captures this information; there needs to be. The only solution I see is coding some 901-907 field to capture this info and index it. 2) even if the info is successfully captured in a MARC tag between 901 and 907, the local ILS has to be able to index this information and display it, and this requires systems-level savvy that previously was lacking, which is why I suspect the 246 was opted for originally.

I don't currently know if Voyager is capable of indexing and displaying MARC tags 901 through 907. I would need to investigate this with my Systems Librarian. Our interim solution has been to code the "local collection" details in the 590 local note field. This makes them searchable only by means of careful keyword searching, done via quotation marks. It's not ideal but it nominally works. What it can't do is give you a clickable link that is indexed. A locally defined 901 through 907 MARC tag could, in theory, allow for this. I suspect Open Source ILS'es might more easily enable libraries to make better use of the 901-907 locally defined MARC tags, making them indexable and clickable.

This is what should have been done to begin with. But that would have required having a full-time cataloger and a full-time systems librarian who worked closely together and better understood the rules...a situation that hasn't been an accurate description of our personnel situation at our library for quite some time; until now, that is.