ICAT Statement on State University Press Publications and Maintenance Projects

According to instructions under the 008/28 in the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data, “items published by university presses are considered government publications if the presses are created or controlled by a government (e.g., state university presses in the United States).” For more information.

CARLI’s “Cooperative Cataloging Guidelines for I-Share Databases” document states, in part, that “Catalogers are expected to adhere to current MARC formats and to consult other standards as appropriate.” See Cooperative Cataloging Guidelines for more information.

However, following the national standard and coding all materials published by state university presses as government publications could have unintended impacts on the results of VuFind advanced searches that employ the government publications limiter.  In many cases, state university press publications share more characteristics with research monographs published by commercial publishers and private university presses than they do with other types of government publications. Coding state university press publications as “s” for state documents may result in users omitting relevant material if they choose to exclude government publications from their search, or, conversely, including irrelevant material when limiting only to government publications. Thus, not following MARC standards may make sense in these cases by coding state university press publications the same as other monographic publications, rather than as government documents.

ICAT team members discussed the conflict between adhering to national and consortial standards and the potential for unintended VuFind search results if state university press materials are coded as government publications. The consensus reached was that individual I-Share libraries should make an informed decision about how they wish to code state university press publications and runonly one of the two following queries, depending on their choice:

1. For libraries wishing to code state university press publications as “blank,” the query named “Bib 008 govpub query 1C code is s PUB maybe UP” identifies university press publications that are currently coded as “s” so that the 008/28 can be edited to “blank.”
2. For libraries wishing to code state university press publications as “s,” the query named “Bib 008 govpub query 2H code is blank could be s PUB maybe UP” identifies state university press publications currently coded as “blank” so that the fixed field can be edited to “s.”

June 2011

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