Karen Coyle's recent(ish) blog post
<http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2010/04/after-marc.html> has been occupying
my thoughts of late-- in particular, her response to Jerome McDonough's
query as to whether MODS might be a viable alternative to MARC. She writes:
"actually, no. Although MODS improves on some of the problems found in
MARC, I don't see a real philosophical shift from the basic concepts in
MARC. It's 'a better MARC XML' but not a web-friendly data format. I'm
leaning away from the hierarchical view that XML favors to something
more E-R like."
MARC, as is often pointed out, was conceived of as a data exchange
format; and while our library systems, bizarrely, continue to provide
the MARC tags view as the default input mode for catalogers, they almost
universally store that data internally in an RDBMS. Do we no longer need
a record-like data exchange format if our systems use, e.g.,
triplestores internally (a prospect which is a ways off, I think)?
Setting aside the question of our cooperative cataloging ecosystem
(OCLC, mostly, for the time being), which is dependent on the record
model, isn't it still handy to have an abstraction representing a
discrete parcel of bibliographic information (e.g., "manifestation
record" or "work record") rather than always needing to decide, on a
case-by-case basis, how much and what sort of data to harvest from
someone else's system?
What I'm wondering is, has the "record" as an abstraction truly outlived
its usefulness? Is it a good idea to dismiss the many real wins of a
standard like MODS (which I won't enumerate here, unless someone would
like me to), a standard which has some traction in the digital library
world, because it embodies the hierarchical document model of XML?
--
Cory Rockliff
Technical Services Librarian
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
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Received on Mon Apr 19 2010 - 15:57:44 EDT