#dublin core

Take field 720, “Added Entry - Uncontrolled Name.” 720 is defined as “Added entry in which the name is not controlled in an authority file or list. It is also used for names that have not been formulated according to cataloging rules.” It was added to USMARC in 1996, specifically to cover situations where records were not created according to library cataloging standards. 720 doesn’t care if the name is a personal name, a corporate body, or a meeting; it doesn’t have any fancy subfields for recording different parts of the name; and importantly, it doesn’t imply the very library-ish concepts of main entry or added entry.

MARC, after all, doesn’t have an “author” or “creator” field. As the discussion paper that led to the creation of 720 notes, “It often surprises non-librarians to discover there is no MARC field defined specifically for author.” The choice of 1XX or 7XX field depends on the type of agent and that agent’s relationship to the thing being cataloged. Which is all well and good for library catalogers, but isn’t very useful in other contexts. The proposal for 720 listed several possibly needs for a more generic author field, including order records in an ILS and generating citations. But the most pressing reason for such a field was the “increasingly common use of USMARC bibliographic records as a vehicle for metadata created by various communities according to various other standards.” And the cool new metadata standard on the block in 1996 was none other than The Dublin Core.

In its very early iterations, the Dublin Core had elements named “Author” and “Other Agent” (which we now know as Creator and Contributor). A pair of MARC Discussion Papers from June 1995 discussing how to map Dublin Core elements to MARC (DP86 and DP88) laid out the differences between how Dublin Core and MARC deal with names. Particularly, Dublin Core doesn’t differentiate between personal and corporate names, and the creator/contributor dichotomy doesn’t map easily into the MARC main entry/added entry framework. A few options were considered for how to resolve those differences and allow for mapping from DC to MARC:

Throw caution to the wind and choose an existing 1XX or 7XX field to put all creator & contributor names

Define new indicator values for the 7XX fields to specify that the names’ exact relationship to the work is unknown

Define a new “generic author” field.

Ultimately, the third option was chosen. Defining a new field kept the integrity of information in existing 1XX & 7XX fields (since those could be relied on to be formatted according to AACR2) and did not require differentiating corporate and personal names. The proposal for 720 compares it to fields 653 for uncontrolled subject terms and 740 for uncontrolled title added entries. It was defined with only two subfields: $a Name and $e Relator term. To this day, 720 has only gained three new subfields, $4 Relationship (in line with other 1XX and 7XX fields) and the typical $6 and $8 control subfields. It remains just a field for names - nothing else.