Karen, One of our Canadian clients sent us the URL for one of your articles, which convinced him that if we harvested ONIX, we could produce MARC records for him less extensively than we are now doing.
I told him that for a majority of titles we catalogue for him, there was already a good MARC record at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), which was free for the taking. In the absence of such a record, the greatest expense in producing a MARC record is the intellectual work of assigning class numbers, and controlled access points, neither of which ONIX accomplishes. (The client is an electronic aggrigator, so does need class numbers in the plural for his variety of customers: 050, 055 for some Canadian subjects, 060 where relevant, and 082.) We do harvest ONIX when there is no hit at LAC, and these "protomarc" records do save some keying time. But they don't put a dent in the intellectual work, which is the prime cost factor in creating MARC records. So I am unenthusiastic about traffic in either direction linked data and interorperability are promising us. I do not look forward with pleasure to a bibliographic world in which keyword searching of captured ONIX data may replace subject headings, shelving by accession number may replace classification, and we may lack controlled main and added entries. One major Canadian university (on the advice of US consultants) has already abolished inhouse cataloguing, and is depending totally on found data, regardless of quality. Once a major contributor to the Canadian bibliographic database, they are now a parasite. Your writing, Karen, may be having effects you did not intend. __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([email protected]) {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
