380 - Form of Work

Form of Work is defined in BF&S as:

"A class or genre to which a work belongs. May be used to differentiate a work from another work with the same title. Multiple forms of work from the same source vocabulary may be recorded in the same field in separate occurrences of subfield ǂa. Terms from different source vocabularies are recorded in separate occurrences of the field."

This tag is not widely used at this point: the NHSL catalog, which included 232,636 bib records the day I wrote this post, had only 318 records containing a 380 tag. However, I think it is a useful tag with potential for wider use in the future.

Subfield a contains the form of work term and subfield 2 contains the source of the term in subfield a if that term is from a controlled list. The source of the term may be selected from the LC list of Subject Heading and Term Source Codes or it can be an uncontrolled term selected by the cataloger.

A few examples of how this tag is used in the NHSL catalog:

• A commemorative medal
  380 _ _ ǂa commemorative medals ǂ2 aat
  aat = Art and Architecture Thesaurus
  
  
• A scanner
  380 _ _ ǂa optical scanners ǂ2 lcsh
  lcsh = Library of Congress Subject Headings
  
  
• Oath of Office by Michael Palmer (in Large Print)
  380 _ _ ǂa fiction
  380 _ _ ǂa book ǂ2  lcdgt
  lcdgt = LC Demographic Group Categories Term and Code List
  
  
• Mount Washington Cog Railway: Climbing to the Clouds
  380 _ _ ǂa television program
  
  
• Gears! Gears! Gears! Super Set
  380 _ _ ǂa educational toys ǂ2 lcsh
  380 _ _ ǂa gearing ǂ2 lcsh
  380 _ _ ǂa construction toys ǂ2 aat