Jeffrey Trimble on the Bibframe e-list made the following proposal for
creating a Super MARC, which would have the advantages of present MARC
(including language neutrality), provide for expanded content, and
allow an easy crosswalk for legacy records.
"1. Record Length. We'll need to adjust the Leader positions of
00-04, and move it to something much higher. Perhaps push bytes 05-23
further out. So we can reserve bytes 00-12 for record length (and
bytes 05-23 become bytes 17-31) That give you up to 9.999999 TB.
That's one hell of a record. Do you think you have enough content
for that large of a record? You can now include the actual printed
book.
"2. Expand the MARC record to have a 4 character numeric tag, starting
with 0001 and continue to 9999. That too is quite big, many fields
repeated, and more fields to define. Oh boy can we define fields.
"3. Indicator count. Again, expand it to 3. We may not use it, but
let's get rolling.
"4. Subfield code count. Again, expand it to 3. You can then tell
the computer that after the "delimiter" ($), you have either a 1 or 2
byte subfield. I can see us using $aa $ab $ac (or if you go to 4
character count you could do something like $a-b $d-a or even $a$b
$d$a. Or even a different delimiter sign as a secondary delimiter."
I wonder if he could be our new Avram. Unlike many theorists, he is
firmly grounded in present realities.
He points out that XML is not a standard, and presents a whole host of
new problems.
I've asked Jeffrey if he would be willing to expand on this for wider
distribution. Bibframe has few subscribers, compared to MARC, RDA-L
and Autocat.
I did not keep his original post, but just found it in the Bibframe
archives.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
