Cataloging Futures

Transitioning from the MARC format (it might really happen!)

It's not too often that opening your email becomes a transformational moment, a "Wow" moment. Well, that was yesterday for me when the announcement came down from LC: Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Libraray of Congress. I sort of though a movement away from MARC was never going to happen (at least not in my work-lifetime). This statement is the direction a lot of us have been waiting for.

As the REM song goes, this really could be "the end of the world as we know it."

A website has been set up for all the activity surrounding this initiative: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative. I will keep an eye on it with cataloger-like, detail-oriented intensity. So, we'll see what this brings, but it sure does seem like a postive step forward.

Update: See also John Mark Ockerbloom's interesting take from an open data perspective.

Revisiting MARC must die

The "MARC must die" meme has resurfaced in several places lately. It refers to Roy Tennant's prescient article by the same title from 2002.

So, over the weekend I printed it off to re-read it and then discovered, self-described library-geek, Sally Chambers will be presenting a workshop next week (at ELAG 2011) entitled: MARC must die? Developing a shared vision for the future of bibliographic metadata.

Sally also gives a preview of her workshop on her blog: Will MARC survive ELAG 2011?

Any thoughts, predictions? Any worthy MARC replacements?

Update: See also: Roy Tennant's article, A bibliographic metadata infrastructure for the twenty-first century, 2004.

Cataloging at its core: the minimum viable record

Cataloging simplification. It's a gospel I preach for a lot of reasons (which I won't tackle here). We can struggle with this issue in the isolation of library land or get out and see what others think. For me, nothing beats listening to those who work with library metadata from the outside. A fresh set of eyes on a perennial cataloging issue.

Here's a post from the lead developer at the Internet Archive's Open Library, George Oates. She's been wrangling with a wide variety of library metadata and lives to tell about it. Her recent post, Minimum Viable Record?, is a must-read for all you catalogers and metadata librarians who think (like me) that in order to more forward, we need to cut back.

h/t Reading 2.0

Update: See also Saskia's posts: Simplification as an opportunity and Simplification as an opportunity - redux

Cool cataloging tool: Web2MARC

Found this last week: Web2MARC is a tool designed for school librarians as a way to automatically generate MARC records for resources they find on the web. This cataloging and metadata generation tool also creates MARCXML, MODS, and CSV formats.

Via School Library Journal