Work Elements

Additional commentary on specific work elements will be provided in later versions as necessary.

category of work

MARC recommendations from the MLA Encoding Standards Subcommittee's MARC Cataloging Inefficiency Task Group:

  • For new bibliographic records, prefer recording genre/form terms in field 655 over the Comp fixed field (008/18-19; 006/01-02) and field 047. Leave the Comp fixed field blank (008/18-19; 006/01-02). In existing records, generally do not update the Comp fixed field unless directed by local policy.
  • Prefer recording genre/form terms in field 655 over field 380 in bibliographic records, and prefer recording genre/form terms in field 380 in authority records.

These recommendations are reflected in the MLA Best Practices in the RDA Toolkit.