The Future of MARC, XML, and Interfaces

A couple of bloggers have picked up and continued the conversation about the future of MARC. I think it's a conversation worth having. It would be great to have some kind of vision statement from MARBI or the MARC Standards Office as to where they see MARC headed. In the meantime, we'll just have to speculate.

Anyhow, Carlos Lopez observes that we're not using unadulterated MARC (a scary thought) but instead MARC parsed in a human readable template. He continues:

There are alternatives to MARC, some even built from MARC (MARC-XML come to mind). But what many cataloguers imagine when they look at MARC-XML (and the anti-Marc lobby haven't exactly disabused them of this), is that they'd have to work on records at the XML level. Why? We do not work directly on MARC now, why would we have to work directly with XML in the future? that's what interface designers do; they design applications that allow us to work on the records without ever seeing what they really look like!

Actually XML is a lot more human readable than raw MARC, but he makes a good point. In the future we'll be working as we do now--using an application that makes whatever schema we end up with more user-friendly.

Comments

[Joseph Shubitowski]

I am not sure I quite understand the comment about "We do not work directly on MARC now, why would we have to work directly with XML in the future?". If I look at the Voyager cataloging client (and others I have seen recently), it sure looks like real/raw MARC to me. A template comes up with a bare bones record in it, with all the tags, indicators, and subfields ready for input. Catalogers must know MARC to know what subfields are legal, what order they go in etc.

To me that is knowing and working on/with MARC. Does anyone or any mainstream vendor provided ILS "hide" the complexity of the MARC record in the cataloging client? Do catalogers deal with this? Most catalogers I know revel in the details of knowing the ins and outs of MARC tagging, indicators, subfielding, etc.

Best.....Joe

[Kevin S. Clarke]

Joe: I believe that is in reference to the parts of the MARC record we don't see (and that it has been reformatted around MARC's field/subfield structure to make editing easier). For instance, we don't see the leader or MARC directory in MARC editors. Some leader info, though, is broken out into a separate display that often appears above the MARC fields. I have a slide from a 2002 presentation that illustrates: http://elane.stanford.edu/laneauth/ksc-access2002/img4.html

[Chris Schwartz]

Joe and Kevin, Thanks for the comments. Joe, along with Kevin's example, you might want to take a look at the post I quoted from. Carlos provides two examples that illustrate the difference.

[Tim Knight]

Hi Joe,
I agree that we 'revel in the details', but we're working in an ILS cataloguing module not directly in the 'raw' MARC (see below). So by the same token I think we won't be working directly in the XML tagged data but will be at a higher level which may look very much like the ILS interfaces we are currently using.
Best,
Tim

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