 The last thing we're going to talk about this week is fixed field coding for serial records. What we've been talking about up to this point are what is known as variable fields, meaning that you can put basically a very willing three-text content into them. The fixed field, on the other hand, is made up of what's called fixed-length data elements, and they are just what they sound like. They're fixed-length, meaning that there's usually like one in three characters you can put in there. And your choices for what to put in there are fixed as well. There are pre-determined codes that you have to choose from in order to decide what to put in these fixed-length data elements. If you use OCLC Connection or CAT Express, you might be used to seeing the fixed field expressed like this. Each of the individual fixed-length data elements are broken down into kind of a more understandable way of interpreting these fixed fields, and it's up at the top of a catalog record. If you've seen a mark record, the fixed field in OCLC is up at the top, and then the variable fields are down below. Your local system may handle it differently. In our system here at the commission, it appears in the 008 field as one big, long string of characters, but then you can click on it and pop it out and get a breakdown of the individual elements, so that's useful as well. So I just want to talk quickly about a few of the elements that are important for serial records. I'm not going to have you worry about the fixed fields at all in your assignments for this week, but I do want to just let you know that they're there. The bibliographic level element will be coded S for serial as opposed to M for monograph, which is what you may be used to. The language element will be a three-letter code for the language that the text of the item is in, so a lot of cases it will be E-N-G for English. There's a list of codes on the Library of Congress website that you can choose from for this. The country of publication is another fixed-length data element. Actually, when it's published in the United States, it reflects both the country and state of publication. There is another list on the Library of Congress website for this one for country codes. The publication status will let you know if it's something that's being currently published or if it's ceased or if this status is unknown. There will be two fields for dates, the beginning and ending dates. There will be a field for frequency to let you know how often it's published and then a field for regularity to let you know whether or not it regularly sticks to this frequency. Another fixed-field element is the type of continuing resource. So whether it's a monographic series, a newspaper, a periodical or none of the above, mostly you'll probably see periodicals. And then the entry convention, all the ones that you're dealing with under the current rules will be coded as 0 for successive entry. This means that, we talked about this a little bit, I think in week one, about successive entry means that a new record is created each time there's a title change or another major change. You don't continue to just add the title changes to a latest entry record. You make a new successive entry, meaning a successive record when there's a big change. I said that there were values that you choose from. You don't have to make up what goes in here and you don't really don't have to memorize what the values are. This is the website for the OCLC bibliographic formats and standards which is a really good resource for looking up values for these fixed-field elements. So here is a sample record of the fixed-field coding. This is for the Tennessee Ancestors example that we looked at earlier in this class. The bibliographic level would be S for Serial. The language was English. It was published in Tennessee, so T and U is the correct code for that. It's currently being published, so the publication status is C. The beginning and ending dates, you'll notice the last two dates for the beginning dates is UU. That means unknown. We know it was published in the 20th century sometime, but we don't know when, so you should make your best guess and put in as much as you can determine of that. If something's still being continued to be published, 9999 is correct for the second date. If it had ceased in, say, 2007, you would put 2007 in that second date, but for something that's still going, you put in 9999. This is an annual publication, so that goes in the frequency field, and it is regular, so R goes in the regularity field. It's a periodical, so P goes in the type of continuing resource field, and as I said, everything will be zero for successive entry in the entry convention field. That's the current practice under the RDA rules. So here is how this would look broken down as the fixed-field is presented in OCLC. You can see the things that we talked about. The VLVL is S for serial. The S slash L is for successive or latest entry, and zero is the term for successive entry. You'll notice things like the type of continuing resource, the frequency, the regularity, the date status, meaning it's still published now. That's why it's C, the dates, and the language, and the country code. So those are the fixed-fields for our example of Tennessee ancestors.