Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
<snip>
We have to soberly pin down what the real virtues of MARC are and not throw these out with the bathwater.
</snip>
I think the fundamental issue is that people want the coding to be "human-readable" and a well-trained cataloger is not considered "human." :-)
So, when we map, e.g. 100,700 = <name type="personal">, this is more understandable to a non-library cataloger; although not that much more. Calling something a "personal name" is exceedingly strange for the uninitiated. But still, others can work with MODS much more easily than MARC and therefore, they may be more tempted to do so and use our records in whatever they create.
But sharing needs to go both ways, and libraries need to ingest whenever possible, too. MARC is very inflexible for this (I still maintain that it's because of its ISO2709 foundation).
In a lot of ways, I think it may be similar to when we switched from MARC-8 to Unicode. Everybody prefers Unicode and it's the real standard now. Maybe the switch from MARC to something else, so long as catalogers could retain their 100, 245 etc. interfaces plus most of their subfields, would be OK and few may even notice a real difference. It could end up being a tempest in a teapot, I don't know.
We need some experimentation on many fronts!
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 05:12:41 EDT