RDA/DC/MARC: "It's All About the Structure"

I ended up not going to ALA, because I was committed to another conference in June. So, this weekend was spent focused on RDA updates at home. I listened to an excellent Talis podcast interview with Diane Hillmann and read Karen Schneider's lengthy post "Out of the Secret Garden: The RDA/DC Initiative". Two very different voices: Karen Schneider's tone is sarcastic until you get about half way into her post. Diane Hillmann is calm and knowledgeable. Their subject matter is the same: the future of library cataloging and metadata standards.

I'll put the gist of some of this in my own words. Library cataloging standards, MARC and AACR2, have served us well in the past, but will not in the future. Computer technology has changed dramatically since MARC was developed 40 years ago. AACR2 was based on a model of libraries when we had card catalogs. In order for library metadata to be useable by communities outside the library (and on the Web) things have to change. Our standards have to be machine-manipulable. This is true of our metadata framework (MARC or whatever replaces it) as well as our content standard (soon to be RDA) and vocabularies. This is the task that must be addressed now for libraries to move forward. It can't wait for future revisions of RDA.

Karen Schneider obscures these issues by criticizing the library community for not having our cataloging standards, e.g., AACR2, in machine readable form, but instead in a text based form. But let's put this into some kind of sane context: the last editon of AACR2 was published in 2002 while in May 2001 the W3C had only just published the XML Schema. Maybe in 2007, If we don't move forward now, then we're to blame. But up until now it's all been too new.

I took 7 1/2 pages of notes listening to the Diane Hillmann interview, so I'm not going to try to cover all the issues discussed. If you're a cataloger suffering through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief about the anticipated changes in cataloging, you'll want to spend some quality time listening to this interview. It's good to know what the Dublin Core community is working on.

Here's what I struggle with: the question that never gets addressed in all these cataloging articles, etc. is the future of MARC. I ask this question at workshops and presentations and no one seems to know. So my question for the library blogosphere is: What's the future of the MARC format? You know it's not just our bibliographic records that are stored in MARC, it's also the Library of Congress name and subject authority files and most libraries' holdings are in the MARC Format for Holdings Data. So, we've made this huge investment to a metadata framework that is, according to some, hopelessly out of date.

Or is it? I've recently found two slide presentations via the Dewey blog "MARC Futures" and "MARC 21 Support System" by Sally McCallum of the Library of Congress. Being slides, they're a bit sketchy. But they seem to hold some promise that MARC will be developed rather than discarded. If MARC 21 is gradually going to move to an XML framework, the changes ahead may not be as radical as some suggest. Any thoughts?

(By the way, the title quote is from Diane Hillmann's interview.)