I've tried to start a list of some of these things as they come up to
answer this question here:
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/MARC_Problems
This is just a tiny subset, but I created it last time someone asked
this question, and I didn't have a ready answer, because it's tons of
things that come up all the time, and I don't always remember them. I am
not interested in debating these one by one, I've just provided them as
examples, and will try to add to it.
Some of them might be 'really' AACR2 problems, some of them might be
'really' MARC problems.
The one way to sum up the larger general issue is that MARC has
effectively become our 'element vocabulary', but one documented as a
'transmission format' instead, not originally designed to fill the
'element vocabulary' function it has come to fill, and not adequate for
it. But that's awfully abstract and general for people to understand or
agree without specific examples, so I tried to start a list of specific
examples. it's a wiki that anyone can edit, and others may add examples
too.
Jonathan
Frances, Melodie wrote:
Can anyone explain WHY it's so hard to get info from MARC? It's been a
while since I did any programming but back in the day of Fortran (lol!!)
et al., it does not seem like it would have been that hard - certainly
not any harder than writing any kind of xml, html, etc. code. Perhaps
there is something other than the old 'if-then' logic going on?
Melodie Frances
-----Original Message-----
From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access
[mailto:rd...@listserv.lac-bac.gc.ca] On Behalf Of McGrath, Kelley C.
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 8:37 AM
To: RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA
Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Systems v Cataloging was: RDA and granularity
I think perhaps this makes more sense if you understand that what is
meant by "machine readable" is more like "machine interpretable" or
"machine comprehensible." Certainly, machines can read and index a MARC
record in an ILS, but the information that is encoded in a way that a
machine can take action on it easily and reliably is a much smaller
proportion of what's in a MARC record.
Kelley McGrath
Ball State University
kmcgr...@bsu.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel CannCasciato <daniel.canncasci...@cwu.edu>
Jonathan Rochkind quoting some Google Books person wrote:
"the first thing we discovered was that the 'machine readable' part of
the MARC acronym was not so much so."
A few thousand library systems out there to the contrary?
