Hello,
Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> While sympathising with this, I'm at a loss if asked where exactly we
> ought to be heading, and how.
It's actually quite simple when you look at it from afar. It is
correct as you say that it's the cataloging language, and I never
called it the culture of MARC for nothing. But first before we leap
into what to do, what is the culprit of this culture of MARC?
Tools.
Library tools suck. If the tools you had were a) smart and b)
collaborating, none of this would have been an issue. Any ILS or
catalog have an internal model to which metadata is converted back and
forth through MARC and its culture (AACR2 and possibly RDA, but who
knows, and then lots of little tricks, tips and cultural magic
intrinsic stuff). If this mechanism had better tools, or should I
rather say smarter, then going from one paradigm to another wouldn't
be so hard.
If you in your old tool put in this and that field with these
sub-fields and values, it should be trivial for any tool to read it
(it's supposed to be machine readable, no?) and parse it and put it
into any back-end model you want.
And that's your answer as well; better tools, fix the ones you've got,
it's the only way to fix this mess without losing all that you've
built up. Write to your tool vendor today and demand progress. I've
seen plenty of librarians being pissed off at their vendors of late
(and not just the OCLC debacle), so perhaps the time is ripe. Perhaps
some smart vendors can see this as an opportunity to save the day and
make oodles of money at the same time.
Whatever happened to that open tools and formats and SOA initiative
from vendors? Why aren't we violently holding them to something like
that? All other industries do. Nudge, nudge.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 05:01:52 EDT