385  Audience Characteristics (R)

Definition

A category of persons for which a resource is intended or a category of persons representing the intellectual level for which the content of a resource is considered appropriate.

For information on punctuation, see the Punctuation section below.

Guidelines

Prefer use of a separate field for each audience term.

For guidance on assigning Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT), see the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms Manual.

1st Indicator

Undefined. The 1st indicator position is undefined and contains a blank.

	Undefined

2nd Indicator

Undefined. The 2nd indicator position is undefined and contains a blank.

	Undefined

Subfields

Punctuation

For records containing or omitting punctuation, follow these instructions:

• Include incidental punctuation needed within any subfields, e.g., commas, periods (following abbreviations or initials), etc.
• Omit punctuation preceding each subfield unless the preceding subfield ends with an ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, period (following an abbreviation or initial), question mark, closing bracket, or closing parenthesis
• Omit the terminal period at the end of the field unless the last word is an abbreviation or initial

For more information on punctuation, including OCLC policy, see section 2.8, Punctuation.

Indexing

For indexing and searching information, see Searching WorldCat Indexes, field 385.

MARC 21

For more information, including content designator history, see MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data, field 385.