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"Amazes me. Useful for what? MARCXML is impenetrable nonsense. Unless
you use it everyday, you're going to spend days figuring out what the
heck is going on with it, which means nobody outside of the library
world will use it. And, as if to prove I'm right, nobody outside of
the library world *does*. Have you ever tried to introduce a
non-library programmer to this stuff. I have. In my experience,
reaction varies between shocked and amused."
Look, it's not my job to defend MARC or to advocate for its continued existence in this day and age. The point is that MARC served an actual useful function. It was a self-describing, self-contained data record that was machine-readable before XML, before relational databases, etc. I agree fully that it should die now. But, whatever...
It certainly is still pretty good at encapsulating the myriad bib data that libraries need to capture on a daily basis. It may be overly complex and overkill to use MARC to catalog the latest John Grisham novel, but it can be useful when we need to capture complex information about, say, incunabula, or similar objects.
Your point about a "non-library" programmer's bemusement at MARC just proves my main point: that libraries need in-house, librarian-programmers. MARC *is* complex, but librarians *do* understand it. If we want to exchange data/services with systems like Amazon (or any other, for that matter), a librarian-programmer can easily pull data from a MARC-based catalog and write a wrapper that formats it in whatever flavor/schema of XML is hip at the moment. He/she can then create a bunch of services which do whatever needs to be done with the records.
With the technology available to us now, it's almost beside the point that libraries store data about their collections in MARC format. Tim, you are correct that MARC in and of itself may be overly-engineered, etc, but I say it is not really a hindrance to libraries exchanging/sharing or doing any other thing they please with their data. We just need the expertise and the imagination (and, yes, we do need to agree upon another format...)
--------------------------------------
Kevin M. Kidd, MA, MLIS
Library Applications & Systems Manager
Boston College Libraries
Phone: 617-552-1359
Fax: 617-552-1089
e-Mail: kevin.kidd_at_bc.edu
Blog: http://datadrivenlibrary.blogspot.com/
Received on Thu Sep 25 2008 - 09:26:44 EDT