Hola,
>> The tower of rigidness it turned into is now the tower of Babel for
>> the library community,
Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> Not sure if this is a fitting metaphor: MARC has become the very
> language of catalogers almost the world over, across the barriers of
> "natural" language!
Well, in its context it makes sense ; after the tower of Babel people
couldn't talk to *others*, so the library world is cramming itself
into *one* language while the rest of the world extends into a
multitude. But yes, I could have made that more obvious. :)
> Any system with verbal tags couldn't achieve that,
> and you also couldn't create a verbally coded alternative to beat MARC
> because it couldn't beat its short-hand-like brevity as well as its
> internationality.
Careful, now; there's plenty of old and new systems and formats that
are comparable to MARCs brevity and internationalization; DIB, SureX,
SGML, mBBS, and probably hundreds of other formats that have their
pro's and con's throughout computing history ...
>> Ugh, and I don't know if this is
>> salvageable.
>
> Has anyone come up with a practicable alternative, together with an
> economically viable migration path, including the rewiring of all
> those brains?
The things that need to happen ;
* Vendor products needs more generic models
* ILS need identity management for the real world
* ILS needs AARC2 / RDA rules as validation, and tightened for the real world
* Libraries and their systems around the world needs to KILL
presentation in MARC
* Libraries need to demand more from their vendors (get guts)
* Libraries need to work out how their meta data is relevant to the world
* Libraries and vendors need to come up with (or reuse) a format the
rest of the world wants to learn or is already using
Some of this has bits done, but there's a LOT that needs to happen.
> OTOH, all systems being capable of exporting MARC, a thoroughly
> convincing and comprehensive new solution shouldn't have too difficult a
> time to penetrate the market. Why hasn't it happened yet? I'm not sure
> inertia is the only answer.
Stupidity? Lack of guts? Fear of change? Lack of guts? Paired with
little money and poor support from the real world? So many to choose
from ...
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Tue Jun 08 2010 - 18:42:54 EDT