Back to Library of Congress Dewey Practices

The MARC Advisory Committee recently approved an update to the format of the MARC 082 field in bibliographic records. The new format will include the three character language code of the translation as defined in the MARC Code List for Languages. All records classified by staff at the Library of Congress will use “eng” as the language code, signifying the use of the standard English version of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). In addition, the date that the DDC was assigned in a bibliographic record will appear in the YYYYMMDD format. For more information, please refer to the MARC21 web page.

The 082 field will appears as follows: 082 00 $a792.8 $2 23/eng/20211001

For biography [B]: 082 00 $020.92 $a B $2 23/eng/20211001

The LC Dewey Program will implement the new format on October 1, 2021.