The first step to getting out of MARC is removing any _guidance_ from
MARC, and removing any _data model_ from MARC. MARC ought to be an
encoding format. If MARC really _was_ just an encoding format, than it
would be easy to use other encoding formats too.
But in fact, significant portions of our mostly implicit data model
(and subsequent 'element vocabulary', in what I believe is the language
of DCAM) are really in MARC. Significant portions of our value
vocabularies (what is the mini-controlled vocabularly for this field)
are in MARC, significant portions of our content guidance (how do you
choose this value) is not in fact in AACR2, but in MARC. We need to put
all that stuff where it goes. Once we've done that, then MARC is just
another encoding format, and we can much more easily switch to a
different encoding format, and use multiple encoding formats
simultaneously.
If the DCMI/RDA thing goes like many of us hope it will, it will be a
significant step in that direction, just by helping us to be clear about
what RDA is, what our element vocabularies and guidance are. But it will
still leave a lot undone too, in large part becuase of the things that
RDA doesn't even cover, that are just left to MARC when they ought not
to be!
Jonathan
K.G. Schneider wrote:
>> The MARC issue seems a lot more relevant than the issue of 'proprietary
>> and outdated' software? Our ILS uses an Oracle db to store the
>> information, and can provide an xml interface to the data - surely it's
>> the data formats that are the issue here. Although the data is 'held' in
>> the system - to a large extent the system does a lot of work to extract
>> the relevant information from the MARC records (which we've insisted on)
>>
>> Owen
>>
>> Owen Stephens
>> E-Strategy Co-ordinator
>>
>
> Yes, I almost didn't add a comment about our software, though that comes
> into play. It interested me that the RDA-DC agreement that Karen Coyle
> wrote about went unmentioned because de-MARCing MARC seems to be pivotal
> to serious change.
>
> K.G. Schneider
> kgs_at_bluehighways.com
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu May 10 2007 - 08:49:03 EDT