Are you good people missing a point about MARC?

[Marc Salomon]

|MARC stands for machine readable cataloging. A MARC record can have three
|fields or three hundred fields - the amount of fields depends on the
|cataloging instructions, like AACR2 for books etc. in libraries.

MARC, SGML etc are not just confusing four letter acronyms or standards for a
database.  They are INTERCHANGE FORMATS, suitcases or containers for transport.
 AACR-2 is a set of rules for encoding domain-specific analytical information
into MARC containers.

This means that in order for two parties to reliably exchange data across a
network, perhaps between two different flavors of computer, these INTERCHANGE
FORMATS are used to ensure that a record on a source machine can be interpreted
exectly the same on a target machine.  AACR-2 has nothing to do with
transport--if its in MARC, then its exchangable.

Databases can be MARC or SGML friendly as they store data, but can only adhere
to the standards when they send something down the wire.

-marc

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