#ukmarc

However, the separate indicators became a problem when the British Library and the Library of Congress started exchanging name authority records in 1994, as part of NACO. At the time, the British Library was using UKMARC, and LC was using USMARC. Both had first indicator values defined for single and multiple surnames, but the two communities used them in different ways. USMARC had a fairly confusing set of rules about when to consider something a multiple surname, depending on the type of element included in a multi-part surname and how many parts made up the whole name, while UKMARC… only cared about whether the surname had more than one part.  Obviously, that led to some discrepancies.  For example, UKMARC treated the name “Walter de la Mar” as having multiple surnames (first indicator 2), while USMARC treated it as a single surname (first indicator 1), because the elements that make the surname more than one part are a preposition and an article.

When the issue became apparent, the USMARC Advisory Group started looking into it, and discovered that very few systems actually used the first indicator for making a sorting distinction between the two types of surnames. So, rather than either side changing their encoding practices for multiple surnames, the distinction was eliminated altogether. USMARC got rid of it in 1996 - first indicator value 2 was rendered obsolete, and value 1 was redefined as just “Surname.” Although I can’t confirm for sure, UKMARC seems to have made the same change (see, for example, the last published version of UKMARC’s definition of field 100). So even though the British Library (and by extension, much of the UK library community) didn’t move from UKMARC to MARC 21 until 2004, differences between the two formats were being reconciled well before that - in this case, due to shared authority projects.