Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
>
> No, to learn MARC does not consist of learning all the numbers and
> codes, that's rather trivial. You have to learn the precise meanings and
> the concept, and that's the same with verbal tags.
So, okay, here's what this means to me: You are saying that MARC serves
as our metadata _schema_ or _vocabulary_. It is NOT just a
serialization format or an exchange format, it is in fact our schema, it
defines what elements are available and what they mean.
Now, to me, THAT is in fact the biggest problem with MARC. We've taken
what was originally designed as simply a transport format, and turned it
into a schema. In the process, by having ONE standard that is BOTH our
metadata schema and serialization format, by entangling these two
concepts, it makes any kind of movement or inter-operability much more
complicated. It makes it nearly impossible to have a serialization of
our data in some _other_ serialization format in a 'lossless' way,
because the serialization format and the schema are so entangled.
It makes our 'content guidance' like AACR2 _very_ difficult to
understand in practice, because the only reasonable way to write content
guidance like AACR2 is to refer to a metadata schema. AACR2 refers to
ISBD -- which "officially" was designed as a metadata schema (although
we/they didn't use that term way back then, that's what it was; library
people were actually doing 'metadata engineering' FIRST). But in
_fact_, in most/all AACR2-using countries, it's MARC21 that BECAME the
true metadata schema. AACR2 keeping up the fiction that it's ISBD makes
these various parts of our metadata control regime mesh with "broken
gears", making everything _much_ harder to understand for both library
and non-library sector people (who might want to inter-operate with our
data).
It makes it insanely complicated to make any changes to ANY of the parts
of the metadata regime, because the parts inter-relate in ill-defined
ways. If what you really need is a change in our 'metadata schema', does
that mean you need a change to ISBD, MARC, or AACR2? Or all of the above?
RDA _theoretically_ uses FRBR (rather than ISBD) as the referenced
'metadata schema'. This to my mind is actually the _most important_
part of RDA, the The problem is that the RDA effort didn't really
realize how important and how challenging this was, they didn't really
realize what it entailed, and didn't take it seriously -- perhaps until
fairly recently. FRBR needs/needed some work to do the job, and it
needs to effect the whole of how RDA is structured. Diane Hillman is
waging an epic struggle to make RDA take seriously the idea that (a
further formalization/specification of) the FRBR model is the metadata
schema which RDA applies guidance to. If she and RDA are successful,
that will be the biggest contribution of RDA, and will make possible
alternate serialization formats that are still "high fidelity".
Jonathan
>
Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 10:47:10 EDT