text: Actually, having been on the "sort of vendor" side of that, what always kept us from indexing fixed fields was the inconsistency of their use. If you have a file of records and 50% have a fixed field filled in and 50% do not, then any search on that field will miss a large number of records that should have been retrieved. You cannot accurately index what isn't there.
  kc
  On 3/10/15 6:38 AM, Cecilia M. Preston wrote:
  [log in to unmask]" type="cite"> Ross,
  My first reaction to many of these questions about what MARC has not or could not do, has been talk to your ILS vendor. �Much of the data embedded in a MARC record was never indexed by the ILS folks because �no one was interested in it� or what was generally referred to in the ancient days of Z39.50 ATS (Author, Title, Subject) was all the patron/user/client is interested in. �When I asked the vendor for my local system at ALA why I could not get access to some information I knew was in a MARC record the answer was simply �we can index that if they want to $$$ for it� �Not something I think many institutions have the funding to do for me.
  -Cecilia
  On Mar 5, 2015, at 6:25 PM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
  Counterpoint: if libraries can do "anything they want" with their data and have had 40+ years to do so, why haven't they done anything new or interesting with it for the past 20?
  How, with my MARC records alone, do I let people know that they might be interested in "Clueless" if they're looking at "Sense and Sensibility"? How do I find every Raymond Carver short story in the collection? The albums that Levon Helm contributed to? How can I find every introduction by Carl Sagan?� What do we have that cites them?�
  How, with my MARC records alone, can I�definitively limit only to ebooks? What has been published in the West Midlands?
  You *could* make a 3-D day-glo print of a MARC record, I suppose - but that seems like exactly the sort of tone deaf navel gazing that has�rendered our systems and interfaces more and more irrelevant to our users.�