I am struck by the thought that "MARC-speak" is hardly the problem. I
am reminded of something my professor said in library school about
customer access. It went something like this:
When I call a plumber, I want my sink fixed. I don't need him to show
me his wrenches!
The problem(s) (and I don't deny that there are many) with MARC is not
that "Joe at the OPAC" doesn't know about 1XX $a. He doesn't care if
Google works off XML or MARC or SQL either. The question is not whether
our "back end" looks nice but whether it works and where it doesn't. A
good example is the problem with the 100 $a containing both forename and
surname when we often need to parse them separately. It has nothing to
do with whether we call it 100 $a or <author personal name>
Just an aside, I think that people are a little too hung up on the
history of MARC as a card production system. Yes it does have that
history, but the root of the forename/surname problem may be less a
function of card production than the still prevalent "westno-centricity"
of much of our thinking.
JJ
The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message and deleting it from your computer.-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 2:13 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: coyle/hillman article from dlib
On Jan 16, 2007, at 12:52 PM, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
>> Get rid of Marc-Speak! Sure that's going to be really hard, but as
>> long as we use
>> 100$a in our day-to-day language to mean an author's name there
>> will be
>> a barrier between the catalogue and the rest of the world.
>
> But how to speak instead?
Speak the language of the users and other computer systems. If we
want to share our data/information with other people and their
computers, then we need to speak their language(s).
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame
Received on Wed Jan 17 2007 - 07:20:47 EST