Blackwell North America (BNA) has announced an AACR2 conversion service for libraries which have pre-AACR2 machine-readable records. For several years BNA has offered authority control for LC subject headings to customers of both its cataloging and COM services. The expanded authority control system manipulates not only subject headings, but also names, uniform titles, series, etc.
The system matches a magnetic tape of bibliographic headings supplied by a library against a master authority file of Library of Congress authority tapes and updates produced by BNA from printed supplements not yet incorpo-rated into LC tapes. The BNA system automatically updates headings to con-form to LC's most recent practices, standardizes them, sets MARC tags and delimiters, creates cross references, and eliminates blind cross references. The fields converted include lxx (main entries), 4xx (series statements), 6xx (subjects), 7xx (name added entries) and 8xx (series added entries).
BNA claims that the converted tapes delivered to the library will be ready to use. The cost of the new ser-vice is approximately $.06 per record, but this will vary depending on the number of records being converted and the related services for which a li-brary contracts at the same time.
The service and its cost appear attractive at first glance. LSN will contact customers of the new service and give an updated report in a future issue.
