856 - Electronic Location and Access

"The information required to locate and access electronic resources, including online resources. Use field 856 in a bibliographic record for a resource when that resource or a subset of it is available electronically. In addition, use field 856 to locate and access a related electronic resource or an electronic version of a non-electronic resource described in the bibliographic record." [Definition from BF&S]

More and more material is made available online every day and it can be really helpful for library patrons to be able to access those electronic resources directly from your library's online catalog. The 856 tag is the key to doing that. Some records that you will download from NHAIS have these links already in them. For example:

• Federal government documents
• Records for images freely available online
• Serials that post their latest issue online
• Items out of copyright that have been digitized

Libraries can also use this tag to add links to their own online resources which may be helpful to patrons interested in a particular item.  This might include:

• Links to themed reading lists on your website might be added to the records for all the titles on the list
• Links to a permission form that you require for patrons borrowing from your library-of-things
  
• A link to instructions for using something in your library-of-things (from the manufacturer perhaps)

The first indicator in the 856 tag tells you how you will connect to the online item. A value of 4 means it is accessible via http (or https) and is the most common value these days.

The second indicator tells you what the relationship is between the item the record represents and the online resource and generates a label for the OPAC display:

• 0 - the resource cataloged is the same as the online resource
  
• 1 - another version of the cataloged resource
• 2 - they are related resources (user manuals for the cataloged item for example)
• 3 - a component part of the cataloged resource
• 4 - another version of a component part of the cataloged resource
• 8 - no  label generated
• blank - no information has been provided

There are lots of subfields defined for the 856, but the one that is most useful for the patron is subfield u -- the Universal Resource Identifier -- the online address of the resource.

If you are creating your own local 856 tags you may also want to use:

subfield h - for non-working URIs (that you want to keep track of for some reason)

subfield x -  non-public note (info about the online resource that staff may need to know)

subfield y - link text (if this is not present your OPAC will display whatever its default is as the link itself; whatever is in this subfield will display as the linked text in the OPAC) 

subfield z - public note (info about the online resource that patrons may need to know)

In Koha (and probably other systems) the subfield y and subfield z are functionally the same -- the content of the subfield will replace the system's default language when displaying the live link. The NHSL record for the Goshen Town Report uses subfield y and the record for the Ellsworth Town Report uses subfield z. They look exactly the same in the public catalog view. Why did we use different subfields here? Because I needed an example to show you that they would look the same. 

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Since this is the last Tuesday of the month it is time for the October 2024 Tuesday Tags Review Quiz.

This is a 5-question self-check that will give you a chance to see how much you have learned about MARC tags this month (or where you may want to go back and re-read).