#usmarc

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.

261   IMPRINT STATEMENT FOR FILMS (PRE-AACR 1 REVISED)  (NR)  Indicators - Both undefined, contain blanks.  Subfield Codes   $a  Producing company  (R)   $b  Releasing company (primary distributor)  (R)   $d  Date of production, release, etc.  (R)   $e  Contractual producer  (R)   $f   Place of production, release, etc.  (R)   $6  Linkage (NR)   $8  Field link and sequence number

Then, when ISBD released a full specification for moving images in 1975, AACR was revised to match it. Thus, the 1976 AACR revision made imprint statements for films the same as for other materials and put them into the 260. The contractual producer was recognized as equivalent to a manufacturer, and went into 260 $f. The production company and releasing company were considered publishers, and went into 260 $b.  

So why is 261 still around, if the cataloging rules haven’t called for it since 1976? Well, CAN/MARC, the Canadian version of MARC, got rid of 261 in 1988, but USMARC hung onto it. Which was fine, until the two countries started bringing their MARC formats together in the 1990s, into what would become MARC 21 (published in 1999). During this process of aligning the two standards, discrepancies between USMARC and CAN/MARC had to be reconciled. (See “Superseded Documentation” in the intro to the bib format.)

Therefore, the Library of Congress proposed in 1998 to make 261 obsolete, along with a few other fields that were valid in USMARC but not CAN/MARC. (This was actually after the two standards were officially announced to be in harmony in July 1997, but, well, oops?) MARBI voted not to make the field obsolete, though. There were concerns that it might be necessary for retrospective conversion of pre-1975 records, since it would be too difficult to transform the imprint statements in those records into the format of 260. Instead, 261 (and the other fields that were included in the same proposal) became “local” fields in MARC21 - so they aren’t officially obsolete, but they are only valid in some contexts. A similar compromise had been made earlier for 9XX fields used in Canada - they weren’t considered valid fields in MARC21, but they were officially documented as part of the standard - so the same was done for 261.