Quoting Bernhard Eversberg <e...@biblio.tu-bs.de>:
Oh I forget: RDA's trouble with MARC was what led to this plan in the first place. Well, that is not MARC's fault but the one of the particular setup that was used for the test. It did not use capabilities and provisions that are in fact there in MARC, like the use of identifiers for authority headings, and record linking for multi-part resources; the part-whole relationship wasn't considered at all.
Bernhard, I just want to comment here on this one point - It is possible to put URIs into MARC fields using the $0, but there are MARC fields that are not 1-to-1 with the thing you need to identify. In other words, the granularity of MARC is not the same as the granularity of identified entities. There were discussions of embedding the $0 after the identified portion, but again it might not be clear which preceding subfields were represented by the identifier in $0. So in fact MARC isn't able to accurately to create the needed association between identifiers and subfields.
I tried to find the discussion in the MARC development documentation but it didn't jump out at me. Perhaps someone else remembers when that discussion took place.
kc
The test, in short, was a much too timid and superficial exercise to base any overall judgement about "RDA in MARC" on. Or had the test, to begin with, been designed so as to be able to then say, "See how inadequate MARC is!"? MARC does have its flaws, I'm really no fan of it as it is now, let alone the curent practice, and I have written up and published a long list of flaws. With some, I don't know why they haven't long since been solved. They may, however, be cured without sacrificing the economy of MARC, without dismissing the entire concept and logic before something demonstrably more economical and logical has been found and proven. Briefly: We can set up our entire enterprise so that, internally, we have the full benefit of an economical format that fits all our numerous and highly diverse management purposes which are of no interest to end-users. Externally, no one needs to be confronted with our internal format, but there can be an increasing variety of options to choose from, all derived from the same internal format. (ISO2709, BTW, is *not* among the flaws and issues. It is a very marginal issue of a purely internal nature and is in no way related to MARC as a content standard. MARC can perfectly well work without ISO, no one needs to bother with it except the few systems that are still unable to ingest anything else, and they can use MarcEdit to get what they want. Abandoning ISO in favor of the external format MarcEdit uses, you get rid of the 9999 character field length limit as well.) Have a good weekend! B.Eversberg.
-- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
