You are so absolutely right about this. Human products are the results
of human activity, which is, by nature, inconsistent. What to do?
Elise
Not disagreeing with how this hinders MARC, but why shouldn't it be
hard to
do better than this? I mean from a human-organization standpoint.
Karen said:
We'd need universal agreement on how to be consistent in MARC, and
universal
compliance. It would also have to be hard NOT to be compliant, and
there
would need to be ramifications. (Plus hopefully we'd be able to justify
all
these rules and limits.)
One of the justifications for how we do things is that every library
community is sooooooooo different that we all need our own record sets
to
customize to death for our vastly distinct "communities." With the idea
that
these are local records, really, how much is MARC any kind of
standard?
For those not understanding what MODS is, see this:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/
Karen G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Elise T. Zappas
Humanities Cataloger &
Automation Librarian
Drew University Library
Madison, NJ 07940
973-408-3667
ezappas_at_drew.edu
Received on Tue Oct 03 2006 - 09:09:35 EDT