[Web4lib] MARC strictness

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

Hello!

You're asking about more than format, you're also asking about
tradition, customs, and the notion of effciency in getting to
information.

Part of what you are asking about has to do with the different speeds
or cycles and different levels of cataloguing quality tolerance that
exist from one type of library to another and one size of library to
another.  Sometimes a very large university library will have to bear
with inconsistencies for a year or more because its budget for
re-cataloguing is spread out over a year or a 5 year plan.  The
inconsistencies can come from legacy collections, change of staff,
re-organisations...

Another part of what you ask deals with the centuries old dialectic
between cataloguing librarians, who are concerned with cataloguing a
book correctly, and referense librarians, who are concerned with
answering (and anticipating, and planning for)questions the users will
have.  The MARC records and the systems that stem from them can be seen
as an artefact of the evolution of that dialectic.  In a sense it is a
compromise between eventually really getting through to the information
with a search and/or a browse and doing a perfectly logical but not
necessarily useful description of a document, all within the context of
changing institutions who cut budgets, send people off to early
retirement, merge five libraries in one, etc. etc.

The fight is endless

--- Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> a écrit :

> 
> I'm looking at a set of MARC records from a library near me.  
> Their cataloging guidelines are a very close translation of the 
> Library of Congress' MARC21 guidelines, but there seems to be a 
> lot of built-in tradition too, that isn't covered in documents.
> 
> My experience (and I should point out that I'm a programmer, not a 
> librarian) tells me that people will follow formatting rules if it 
> matters, but not otherwise. 
> Is this kind of inconsistency a problem, and how do libraries 
> handle it?  Do you insist that such errors be corrected (and how 
> do you motivate this requirement?), or have you long since given 
> up that fight?
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
> 



	

	
		
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