DK Bibliographic and MARC Record

Bibliographic Records are created at DK for each periodical/continuation appearing from India. The records are made available to libraries through lists of periodicals compiled every now and then; subscribers’ guide to Indian periodicals/serials; lists, by subjects, of available backsets of periodicals; and MARC21 records for serials.

MARC21 Records with books

DK has made remarkable strides in cataloguing of books since the beginning. A salient feature has been the attempt to follow established authorities in cataloguing. We followed first the AACR-I and then switched to AACR-II and thereafter to AACR-II with ISBD-with the help of our qualified librarians. With introduction of computers in DK in 1986, we switched over to an online cataloguing environment from 1991, coming out with the USMARC records in 1996 and ushering in the MARC21 later.

DK now offers MARC21 records for books published in the South Asian countries. We have made available MARC21 records for also books in the many Indian languages which are not in the Roman script (ALA/LC Romanisation tables for books not in Roman script). Created by professionally qualified and trained librarians, it includes Dewey Decimal Classification and LC subject headings from the online edition.

MARC21 with Tag 880

A remarkable addition to the MARC21 records has been the inclusion of Tag 880. Tag 880 denotes Alternate Graphic Representation of another field in the same record, which would be the script of various Indian languages in which we deal with. With the aid of our experts, we have developed our in-house software through which we can produce Tag 880 for records of all the books in the Indian languages that are not in Roman script. The significance of Tag 880 is that with this, librarians and end users can search, locate and file a book. We have made available this feature for South Asian books as well for a minimal additional cost. Tag 880s are generated in UTF-8 so that most systems can support it. Tag 880 is available for all the Indian/South Asian languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Telugu, Tibetan and Urdu.

Retrocon

Often, libraries have old collections of books or other material in South Asian languages that are reflected poorly or not at all on their catalogue databases. In such a case, we offer to provide MARC21 records for such collections. This is our Retrospective Conversion (Retrocon) Services. This is immensely significant as it helps a library to retrospectively catalogue its material, which otherwise may exist unrecorded and so be of no use. Be it a large library or a small library or a consortium, we, with our technical background in the field of library science, have proved capable of providing Retrocon Services. The kind of Retrocon services we offer include conversion of records in paper/card format into electronic records (MARC21 formats using AACR-II R and cataloguing of books that are awaiting cataloguing. There is no need to forward the books to the libraries in the latter case; some elementary procedures would be required and it is then entirely upon our hands to create the desired records. The old records in ANSI/Marc-8 can be converted into Unicode/UTF-8 for libraries without burdening them with any additional work.

INDscripteR and INDenhanceR

INDscripteR, the very first software created by the Software Division of DK, supports conversion of Romanised text as per ALA/LC Romanisation tables into the original Indus script of that very language using Unicode. This is in order to help librarians and library users look at and identify a product data on the computer screen in the scripts in which it is originally available. We make available INDscripteR for converting texts into most of the major Indian languages as well as Tibetan. INDscripteR is easy and convenient for the end user. Various options of licensing/billing are made available customised to the user requirement and regular updates of the software are made available to the customer.

INDenhanceR, a new product created by our Software Division, is a tool for enhancing MARC records with Indian/South Asian scripts. It is used for enhancing MARC records with Tag 880 (Alternate Graphic Representation) in the original script of the book using Unicode. Using INDenhanceR is simple: the librarian has to simply open a file containing various MARC records of one particular language, run the batch conversion process and save the file. The software can be used as a MARC records editor as well. You can convert MARC-8 records into UTF-8 using it. Among its salient features are that it works on the basis of Unicode for worldwide usage and works strictly according to ALA-LC Romanisation tables (a standard transliterations scheme approved by the Library of Congress and American Library Association). It is available for all the major Indian languages and can be customised as per customers’ needs.
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