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MARC can do all kinds of crazy things. I used to work with folks who had been hacking on MARC since the 1960s. If I remember correctly, at one point it got pu
by tingletech 2y ago
MARC can do all kinds of crazy things. I used to work with folks who had been hacking on MARC since the 1960s. If I remember correctly, at one point it got punched onto dangling chad cards (and of course was used to print the cards in the card catalog in the library).
> The real problem is that USMARC uses an int with 4 digits to store the size of a field, followed by 5 digits for the offset.
A colleague told me they used to exploit this "feature" to leave hidden messages in MARC records between fields.
- quink 2y agoWell, until some system comes along that relies on the directory for the tags only and just splits the record using the separator characters. Which is a valid enough approach to either work around bad encoding or if your record is on something other than a magnetic band and you don't need to know what exact offset to move to. Hidden is a very relative term there.
- tingletech 2y agoI never really worked with MARC much (except for a script for generating patron records once a quarter to load new students and staff into III and somehow we marked obsolete users to change their status) but I used to work at the successor organization to the University of California Division of Library Automation (nee University Library Automation Program), and one of the folks telling MARC war stories was describing doing this with with a tool he created specifically for creating pathological MARC records. They aggregated records from local systems into the systemwide "Melvyl" (during ULAP they produced microfiche binders of the union catalog) -- I don't know that they ever redistributed the MARC to other display systems.