#ci format

In 1994, a new field was defined in the Bibliographic standard for “Hours, Etc.” The field was to be used to record when the item being described was available to be accessed, and was mostly used for electronic resources.

(Sidenote: The idea that some electronic resources used to only be accessible during certain days and times is wild to me. That is not a version of the Internet that I have ever known. That world also lives on in field 856 $v, which similarly allows for recording days and times that a resource can be accessed.)

The Community Information format has a field for similar information, also called “Hours, Etc.” and then defined as field 301. In the CI format, the field contains: “Information as to the days and/or times pertaining to the operations of the community information entity (such as when the office of a program or organization is open, when a club is to meet, when an event is to take place, when a person is available for hire), as well as to special information, e.g., the size of the staff, whether or not a translator is available.”

(For folks who aren’t familiar with the Community Information format, it was created in the early 1990s for cataloging non-library resources like people, organizations, and community events. Almost no one uses it, but it is still around. I am absurdly fond of it.)

So when the hours field was being defined for the Bibliographic standard, the initial plan was to make it also use the 301 tag, to match the similar field in Community Information. But there was a problem! 301 had previously been used in the Bibliographic format for something different. Up until 1983, field 301 was Physical Description for Films. Apparently, in pre-AACR2 cataloging, the physical description of films was different enough from other materials, that there was a field just for that in the visual materials format.

Well, another principle of MARC development is that once a field is made obsolete, that tag cannot be reused for anything else. That way, older records that still contain obsolete fields don’t have their information misunderstood by newer systems. So “Hours, Etc.” in the Bibliographic format was given tag 307. But now the Bibliographic and Community Information formats had similar information in fields with different tags!

So in 1995, a proposal was made to change the Community Information field from 301 to 307, to “keep the Community Information format in sync with the Bibliographic format from which many of its field tags have been borrowed” and correct the “oversight” of using a tag which had already been used for an obsolete field. It was a relatively minor change, especially since the Community Information format was at the time still provisional. But it shows the work that has to be done to keep the various MARC formats in sync as both the formats themselves and the nature of library description change over time.