My point exactly! If and where MARC labels useful information you can
always make equivalences (in the background) to say:
245 $a = Title = Titulo = ...
245 $b = Subtitle = Subtitulo = ...
The problem is not that your data is in MARC, and you can't read MARC
easily. (It can be translated, and pretty easily at that!) The problem
is if the data contains what you don't need, lacks what you do need, or
mixes things you need to parse separately.
MARC can be converted to XML easily. I've done it. I got a much larger
file, but it didn't improve the data. In fact, if you found the perfect
combination of data elements, you could almost certainly reconfigure
MARC to accommodate it. I'm NOT arguing that we do that! But we need to
focus on the problems/solutions to get a consistent and useful set of
data elements, not the terminology/tagging. MARC is singularly concise,
which is a considerable advantage. It's NOT hierarchical, which is a
big problem.
JJ
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From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Ross Singer
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 1:24 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: coyle/hillman article from dlib [mods]
On 1/17/07, Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> And how easy is it to talk MODS and be instantly understood, like if
> someone says 260$c now or 700$t.
Yes, instantly understood. Instantly. Nobody would be the slightest
confused by that.
Do you realize how ridiculous your argument sounds? All these labels
are just /tokens/. They /could/ be anything, sure, but something with
semantic meaning is /immediately/ going to be more accessible than
numbers, more numbers, letters and symbols.
What about the fixed fields?
It seems that we keep 'reinventing MARC', as you say, because it's the
same people who are working on it.
-Ross.
Received on Wed Jan 17 2007 - 14:39:38 EST