Trish Culkin wrote
> I think it *IS *more difficult that it should be, and hence more expensive,
> to convince system designers and software engineers to work with the
> intricacies and embedded intelligence of AACR2/MARC Meta data. In
> over 25
> years of managing crews of developers in two different ILS companies, I
> found that their tendency was always to "rethink" or
> "reinvent", or at least
> "simply" the application and use of MARC data, and this is likely
> true at
> Google today.
This is true. If we want our cataloging records to interoperate *easily* and *coherently* with other metadata, and I think that many of the preceding posts on this list have shown that this is happening right now in Google Books where it does not work very well, MARC must be easier to work with. Certainly, the ISO2709 format is a dinosaur that should have been turned into a fossil a *long* time ago. And we have to admit that, while the coding in the MARCXML may be perfectly comprehensible to us, e.g.
<marc:datafield tag="700" ind1="1" ind2=" ">
<marc:subfield code="a">Charles, Ray,</marc:subfield>
<marc:subfield code="d">1930-</marc:subfield>
<marc:subfield code="4">prf</marc:subfield>
</marc:datafield>
the codes are completely incoherent to 99% of the human race, and probably 99.9% of programmers. Many simply won't use our records because the codes themselves are completely outmoded in today's newer formats. They would just as soon take an ONYX record.
This is part of losing the control that librarians have traditionally enjoyed, and that I and others have discussed in other messages. We absolutely must adapt to the world instead of expecting the world to adapt to us. Does anybody out there really expect programmers to learn MARCXML? While going with an XML version is definitely a step in the right direction, there is still a lot of work to do to make our metadata useful today.
I believe we can adapt to this new world, but it won't be easy.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Mon Sep 21 2009 - 12:45:42 EDT