Are you good people missing a point about MARC?

[Jon Knight]

On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Marc Salomon wrote:
> 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.

It _might_ be exchangable but until recently there's been little 
guarantee that the MARC used by one community (say the US's USMARC) will 
be understandable to a system that uses a different "sort" of MARC (say 
UKMARC or one of the more wacky vendor and/or national specific MARCs).  
Unless people agree about what goes into the MARC records (which is what 
AACR2 is partly about) then the ability to split up the binary record 
structure doesn't exactly buy you very much if you don't know what to do 
with the information inside it.

The merging of UKMARC and USMARC is helping out a little for us, but 
there's still plenty of other MARCs out there.  Be careful!

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *