The Format and Display of the MARC 505 Contents Note: Some Recent Practical Developments

This article identifies trends in the use of the MARC 505 field through the analysis of records downloaded from the UK's National Bibliographic Knowledgebase. It finds that the proportion of records where this field is formatted in the established way—with items delimited by a double hyphen—is rapidly decreasing, and alternative formatting, including HTML, is becoming increasingly common. A project at the author's library demonstrates that modern public catalogs are capable of sophisticated display without requiring HTML in the underlying records and that ultimately the consistency of the established formatting is probably better for display than HTML.