Agreed here as well.  And just to clarify: the value I see isn't so much in 
Open Library as a "high-quality" (by whatever MARC-based standards) cataloguing 
source, but rather one that's free/libre as opposed to, say, OCLC/WorldCat.

That alone is motivation for libraries to participate in (read: contribute 
records to) Open Library, as long as they can get something back out (i.e. via 
Z39.50), even of lesser "quality".

MJ

On 2010-05-11, at 10:40 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> Whatever data you have, there is some way to encode it in MARC.   If you 
> didn't capture everything in the original MARC with full granularity, 
> then, sure, of course your resulting "back to" MARC is not going to have 
> all the information the original MARC had. But it will have all the 
> information in your actual OL record.   That's all I'm suggesting would 
> be useful.
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> Tim Spalding wrote:
>> But could you really walk back from OL to MARC? It seems to me
>> OL-to-MARC conversion is a lossy, one-way conversion. You could get
>> some sort of placeholder record, like libraries sometimes have for a
>> pre-publication book, but not much more.
>> 
>> Shall we go through examples, or shall we just agree on that?
>> 
>> Tim
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