> 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 ...
Actually in recent projects we are exporting in MARC then running through yaz to make xmlmarc and make it utf8 (since our ILS is not Unicode). It's actually an extra step that's a waste of time to put it out in MARC. Newer systems can output in xmlmarc. Once you have that format you don't really need to continue to use MARC tags although you can if you want to, I think MARC was built for a time when it worked better in processing to use numbers but xml is more verbose. There are actually other limits to MARC you may not think about, like numbers of characters and tags. Those are old, unnecessary limits. In most systems the numerical tags get mapped to display labels anyhow. It's just that it used to be awkward to try to store those labels with the data but now it makes more sense to do that. The concepts of author/title etc. become more important than keeping the MARC tags when you use the data in newer systems. I think MARC will just age out as the data gets moved !
to newer systems because it's not useful like it used to be. Changes in the ideas of things like "collation" will be more important than the MARC tags. The number of pages is important to match a physical book to a description, but for an ebook it's irrelevant. And even that number of pages may be a lot less relevant than an identifier that can allow you to pull up a scanned image of that whole book. If you want to make sure what you have in hand is the 13th edition of the volume, the one with the special introduction by so and so, you don't have to rely on matching title page transcription and exactly how the pages were printed. You can call up an image of the book and verify that's the one you want.
Anyhow, I'm finding MARC sort of awkward already. It's nice to have the utility already written to output it but then I usually have to pull it apart to use the data in another system. I think MARC will get mapped to new systems and go away.
Frances McNamara
University of Chicago
Received on Thu Jun 10 2010 - 14:56:08 EDT