Is Marc fit for purpose?
Is Marc fit for purpose? - Depends what the purpose is of course.
Last week in another posting I was singing the praises of the NGC4Lib mailing list:
Talking of conversations, get yourself signed up to the NGC4Lib (Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries) mailing list. Well worth joining to listen in on insightful discussions around the next generation library catalog and associated library stuff. (Archives available here)
Over the last few days there has been an excellent debate ‘coyle/hillman article from dlib‘ underway on the list. The starting point was the recent article by Karen Coyle and Diane Hillmann in the D-Lib Magazine “Resource Description and Access (RDA)“.
In response to quotes from Coyle/Hillmann such as:
Too many librarians still consider themselves the only true experts both in bibliographic metadata creation and in service to information seekers, behaving condescendingly to others newer to the information enterprise. But users have spoken with their keyboards, overwhelmingly preferring non-traditional and non-library sources of information and methods of information discovery.
Eric Lease Morgan opened up the debate with this comment:
In short, maybe cataloging rules need to be radically altered not incrementally tweaked, and the rules may need to take into greater consideration the almost completely changed information environment in which we live and work.
Stimulated by this:
Get rid of Marc-Speak! Sure that’s going to be really hard, but as long as we use 100$a in our day-to-day language to mean an author’s name there will be a barrier between the catalogue and the rest of the world.
… from my colleague Rob Styles, the debate has since evolved in to a discussion around the the merits of Marc, as an encoding/transmission format and as a conversational style chosen by the cataloguing community. Is MODS a good evolution towards a metadata standard that help library data be consumable on a web-scale where most of the implementers do not do Marc-Speak.
Are things things like MODS just Marc with lipstick on; do we need something new; is just translating Marc in to some new fancy XML dialect sufficient or is there a fundamental problem with it as a record format; why oh why does Marc concatenate an author’s name plus a bit a of punctuation in to single field; these are all questions raised.
My two pence worth in the debate included this:
If libraries are going to have other sites and services consume their services, we are going to have to provide access and results in a way that they understand and are used to. The underlying complexities of the data standards, and the issues around those standards must be hidden from them. Just like Amazon, you send them a search string, and they give you data back. How that data is held and indexed is their problem not ours. The same should be true for consumers of our services.
Coming from Talis you would expect me to say, but I make no excuses for it, that the bibliographic world needs to provide its services via a Platform within which is hidden all the complexities that should be of no interest to the consumers of our services. In that way ‘Library’ will get built in to the rest of the information environment; if not, libraries will remain the domain of the ’specialist’ Internet user.
This debate raises some big ‘ol issues, and challenges some long held opinions and assumed truths, so its not going to conclude sometime soon. Nevertheless it is good to see it starting [at last]. It is up to all of us to keep it going constructively towards a conclusion.
(Photo taken by clairemaphone displayed in Flickr)
Technorati Tags: Talis, NGC4Lib, Talis Platform, Marc, MODS, Libraries, Metadata
