Description:  

What is the maximum length of a bibliographic record in ALEPH?

What is the maximum field length?

What is the maximum number of fields and subfields in a record?

Resolution:  

Record length:    ALEPH limits a DOC record (BIB, HLD, ADM, authority, course reading, or ILL) to 45,000 characters text. This can be seen in the alephm/source/copy definition of the Z00:
02 Z00-DATA PICTURE X(45000).

Note that characters with diacritics take up two bytes each and that Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and CJK characters are all double-byte in ALEPH's unicode implementation. Since ALEPH uses utf-8; English a-z are stored as single-byte characters.)

Field length: ALEPH limits a DOC field to 2000 characters; you cannot enter more than 2000 characters in the Cataloging interface.

Number of fields:  Limited only by how many can fit in the 45,000 character-limit for the record.

Number of subfields: 5,000.
 

• Article last edited: 27-May-2016