Participants in the cooperative NACO authority project are required to notify Library of Congress when the process of creating or modifying an authority record results in a need for bibliographic file maintenance (BFM) in LC's catalog, i.e., the correction of a heading on one or more LC bib records. Recent changes have reduced the number of cases which require this kind of reporting. [More in the extended entry].
The two major categories which no longer need to be reported are changes which effectively replace one version of a heading with another--e.g., a change which modifies a 100 heading; and changes which affect older records which LC does not distribute as MARC21 records.
The former category is discussed in detail in a FAQ posted to the NACO web site at:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco/bfmguide.html
The site offers examples of the kinds of changes that need to be reported (e.g., two authors whose titles have been confused under a single name heading), and those which don't.
The second category involves records outside the scope of the BFM rule. Some are marked with the legend [from old catalog] in LC's browse indexes (at catalog.loc.gov). Other older records when viewed in LC's web catalog as MARC format records show in the 906 field the words "OCLC replacement." The answer to question 4 in the NACO FAQ on older records at:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco/bfmfaq.html#4
instructs us that neither of these are candidates for BFM because they haven't been distributed by LC. You may find versions of older catalog records in OCLC flagged "D" (i.e., based on LC cataloging), but that's because some other library did copy cataloging from an LC card and correctly put DLC in the 040 $a; they're not actually distributed by LC as MARC21 records.
Of course, there is also an element of frustration in seeing a mistake and being asked not to report it; but that's the rule for now.
Posted by s-hear at January 31, 2005 2:39 PM