[Web4lib] MARC strictness

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi,

On 11/30/05, Walt.Crawford at rlg.org <Walt.Crawford at rlg.org> wrote:
> I keep hearing about a "more semantically rich" format than MARC21--at the
> same time I hear that all we need is "a single line of undifferentiated
> keywords and identifiers." The odds of widespread adoption of a more
> semantically rich format strike me as similar to the odds of universal
> success of the Semantic Web (that is, slender); what would be lost in
> abandoning the structure defined by MARC might not matter for some users
> but would certainly hamper in-depth research by specialists...

Well, as the technical editor for a book on the Semantic Web I'd just
like to say that that is the biggest pile of ... uh, no you're
absolutely correct about the Semantic Web. It won't work, even if the
prototypes pop up and say "Hey!" proving that they can replicate
something that has already been done in far more efficent ways
elsewhere.

There are a number of "semantically richer" library formats about, but
my own investigations seems to find that they're all basically someone
thinking about a schema more than thinking about a datamodel that
might fit some richer scheme. (The exception here is FRBR, which falls
into the pit of "it's only a datamodel" which a lot of people want to
retrofit into MARC (!!).)

In my world, I see MARC as a foggy soup that I can extract samples
from, analyse and present some interesting results from. I never use
it on its own; for that, the data itself is too flakey and poor,
riddled with human errors and wants and needs, and generally hard to
grasp. And I think you're right; we cannot create a richer format to
encapsulate all that the cult of MARC has accumulated in the last 30
years.

Sometimes, when I feel just a tad masochistic, I tend to enjoy the
flakey nature of MARC, thinking that the power of MARC is that it is
useless all by itself and *needs* to be analysed and nurtured and
patted and lulled ... But then at other times I tear my hear out, now
resulted in baldness. Thanks, MARC.


Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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