It would probably help frame your question a bit if you went into a little more detail as to where you think the problem is.
Are your catalogers struggling with some particular kind of data entry? Is it that you're trying to do stuff with MARC data (say, via an export or something) and you find the MARC structure/cataloging rules too convoluted? Or are you just trying to, say, tweak templates in your ILS's OPAC and finding frustration with the complexity of the data? Or something else? I mean, personally, I haven't met a single person that's relatively new to coding in libraries that doesn't have the idea of doing something better than MARC (and, I too, was that person). Bill has mentioned some of the problem (that is, ILS migrations), but there's also the question of where you'd get your actual catalogs records if not somewhere like OCLC (I don't imagine your library does all original cataloging). The standard (and rules) have a LOT of infrastructure behind them (40+ year old standards do that), which would be non-trivial to just throw away (cue RDA's problem with migrating to RDF here). If your problem is more like my second question to you, why not try transforming your MARC into something more palatable? http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/#stylesheets -Ross. On Mar 14, 2012, at 8:59 AM, Matt Amory wrote: > Is there a full-featured ILS that is not based on MARC records? > I know we love complexity, but it seems to me that my public library and > its library network and maybe even every public library could probably do > without 95% of MARC Fields and encoding, streamline workflows and save $ if > there were a simpler standard. > Is this what an Endeca-based system is about, or do those rare birds also > use MARC in the background? > Forgive me if the question has been hashed and rehashed over the years... > > -- > Matt Amory > (917) 771-4157 > [email protected] > http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-amory/8/515/239
