question regarding how to handle MARC21 records with no indicators.

[John David]

Hello,

I am working on setting up a Koha Framework to support seed-libraries and seed-banks.  I am currently using PyMARC to build the equivalent of biographic records from databases of plant species.  Since the basic species information does not change, I am currently looking at using the Corporate Name (110) for analogy.  BTW, I have databases with 10's of thousands of native species, so I really do not want to build each of these by hand if I can help it...

While working on this I ran into an odd situation where the Koha Framework specification file I was using defined most of the indicators as '' (or NULL for unused).  This triggers warnings in PyMARC.  In the LoC MARC documentation they often use '#' for unused indicators, and reading through PyMARC's source code I see that it defaults to ' ' (or a <space>).  When I set it to a <space> I do not get any warnings, but the place where an indicator should be is set to '\'.  If I set it to '#', then I get '#'.  Here is an example of using a <space>:

=LDR  00282    a2200085   4500
=001  019ef740-7470-7b60-bc55-2cdda739f5c8
=003  Koha-Seed
=005  20260623213057.00
=110  \\$aSanguinaria canadensis L.$bbloodroot$0saca13$2plantsdb$6https://www.loc.gov/standards/sourcelist/taxonomic.html
=251  \\$a0.1$2Koha_Seed

What is the proper way to set an unused indicator.  BTW, all the documentation always appear to use '0' and '1' and not ' ' or something else.  Also, setting the undefiend to <backslas> can cause problems in formatting because on at least Linux systems a <backslas> is a character escape...

  Thanks, and best regards,

  EBo --

[Geoffrey Spear]

Unused/undefined indicators should be a blank space, " ". This prints in the string representation as \ because it's hard to see a blank space. LoC uses # for the same purpose in their MARC documentation, while OCLC uses a picture of a b with a line through it, which looks okay but can't be copied and pasted because it's an image file.

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[John David]

Thank you, Geoffrey, for the verification. I have (re)set the default to ' ' (<space>) for now, but will add a command-line option to set it to '#' if I or someone needs it later.

Also, thank you, and all the people that contributed to PyMARC.  You helped turn a fantasy project into something doable.  Before finding PyMARC I probably spent a couple of weeks pouring through the LoC documentation trying to figure out how to properly build a valid MARC record.  This has made that easy.

  Thanks again,

  EBo --