Peter Schlumpf wrote:
>
> I have thought for well over a decade that MARC has become a mind prison for
> the library community that threatens to choke it into irrelevance. Time to
> come up with a mapping system to transport the data contained in it, throw
> that old mess out the window and start over again!
>
While sympathising with this, I'm at a loss if asked where exactly we
ought to be heading, and how.
MARC is not just a tagging scheme! It is so pervasive and ubiquitous in
librarydom that there is no way to just throw it out the window. Perhaps
the most important but frequently underestimated point is that MARC is
the very language of catalogers. It enables effective communication, it
ensures that catalogers can talk to each other across boundaries, even
natural language barriers because it is numbers and codes they are
talking, not words. To replace it means nothing less than rewiring their
brains for a new way of thinking. Which might work, and will have to,
once, and this is a big "once", this new way of thinking has been
defined. What is the new "mapping system"? MODS? I beg your pardon.
Can you envision catalogers talking MODS to the same effect and
efficiency they are now talking MARC? Efficiency matters.
We have to soberly pin down what the real virtues of MARC are and
not throw these out with the bathwater.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 04:04:00 EDT