Cataloging Futures

RDA/MARC working group established

Lots of interesting cataloging news this week. I was able to glimpse it going by as I looked up from full-immersion in METS and Dublin Core (that "other planet" that the non-MARC metadata folk live on). First up, some MARC news.

Yesterday on the MARC and RDA discussion lists, Marjorie E. Bloss, RDA Project Manager, announced the establishment of the RDA/MARC Working Group:

Under the auspices of the British Library, the Library and Archives Canada, and the Library of Congress, an RDA/MARC Working Group has been established to collaborate on the development of proposals for changes to the MARC 21 formats to accommodate the encoding of RDA data. With the implementation of RDA anticipated for late 2009, the Working Group will be drafting proposals for review and discussion by the MARC community in June 2008.

Although the MARC 21 formats support the encoding of descriptions created according to a wide range of content standards, the close relationship between AACR and MARC 21 has contributed to the efficient exchange of information among libraries for decades. The RDA/MARC Working Group will identify what changes are required to MARC 21 to support compatibility with RDA and ensure effective data exchange into the future.

Members of the RDA/MARC Working Group are:

• Everett Allgood (New York University and CC:DA Liaison to MARBI)
• Corine Deliot (British Library)
• Rebecca Guenther (Library of Congress)
• Bill Leonard (Library and Archives Canada)
• Sally McCallum (Library of Congress)
• Marg Stewart (JSC Liaison to the RDA/MARC Working Group)
• Martha Yee (UCLA Film and Television Archive)

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.

Future of MARC and the Semantic Web

I've been blogging for about 6 months now and have 100+ library blogs in my reader. But one topic I'm really interested in doesn't get much press: the future of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC).

When it is mentioned, MARC usually gets a bad rap. It's often viewed as worn out legacy metadata better suited for card catalogs with an antiquated late 1960's data structure that mystifies computer programmers when they first encounter it.

However, lately I've read a few things that say otherwise. Some say MARC is very good metadata--it just needs to be morphed into something more Web-friendly. This more positive view describes MARC as a complex metadata format, with a good level of granularity--well suited for what it was intended for at the time it was developed.

Here's one of those voices. In a post primarily about libraries and the Semantic Web, Richard Wallis comments on MARC:

So does the library world pack up its knowledge and collaborative spirit and jump on the SW bandwagon, leaving the good, but old creaking and inflexible library standards such as Z39.50 and MARC, behind? - In the very long term probably yes, but over the next while what libraries are doing today, in the way they are doing it (with the exception of the format of the odd MARC tag), is still very valuable. [emphasis mine]

I would contend that, from a cataloguing point of view, libraries are providing more value than current software packages and their user interfaces can make full use of. Some of this value is being shown by the work around faceted browsing, FRBR and the like, but this is just scratching the surface. Transferring/transforming the data in to RDF, opens up opportunities to walk or browse through the semantic relationships expressed between records and external resources to deliver a more holistic view of a resource and its place in the world.

The discussions I have watched go past can be characterized; as a binary choice between RDF and MARC. That is wrong. As we, and others, have shown MARC is a rich source of data that can drive the expansion of the semantic web. [emphasis mine]

ALA 2007: Informing the Future of MARC

Here are the presentations and handout from the ALA Annual Conference program, Informing the Future of MARC: An  Empirical Approach (sponsored by ALCTS and MARBI, Washington, DC, June 23, 2007):

• Informing the Future of MARC: An Empirical Approach (Presentation by Moen and  Miksa)
• Informing the Future of MARC: An Empirical Approach (Handout)
• MARC Futures (Presentation by Sally H. McCallum, Library of Congress)

Via Never Stop Learning

 

 

Interesting Post on MARC

Here's a post by Bradley P. Allen, founder and CTO of Siderean Software, Inc. on MARC: "Out of the MARC frying pan". He's been reading the RDA discussion list and noticed that some in the cataloging community are hesitant to give up the MARC format.

"From my point of view as a complete outsider to the library community, it's clear that evangelists like Diane Hillman and Karen Coyle have a long way to go to make these type of people comfortable. While there appears in some circles to be excitement in the announcement of the teaming-up of the RDA and DCMI communities to push the standard in the direction of greater relevance to a broader community, I worry that this well-intended effort might fall victim to the technology adoption problems that befell the RDF standard over the last decade. That is, that premature design commitments that fail to take hard-won implementational experience into account provide those resisting change with an excuse to reject new technology."

 

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.)

Insights into the Future of MARC

I definitely feel behind the curve! I just discovered yesterday (while looking around for cataloging stuff to blog about) Roy Tennant's recent article where he mentions the MARC Content Designation Utilization project (MCDU project). This is the first I've heard of it. It's quite an impressive empirical study on the extent to which catalogers have used the MARC 21 content designation. Check out the MCDU website (important reading for all those interested in the future of the MARC format).

Also, ALCTS is sponsoring Informing the Future of MARC: An Empirical Approach at the ALA Annual Conference on Saturday, June 23, 2007.  This program will deal with the findings of the MCDU project. Here's the ALA program description:

"Informing the Future of MARC: An Empirical Approach
ALCTS
Track: Collection Management & Technical Services; Cataloging & Metadata
Did you know that catalogers use only 10-20% of available MARC fields/subfields? Given evolving search behaviors and the amazoogle effects, do our bibliographic records provide information users need? This program presents findings from a major IMLS-funded research study on catalogers' use of MARC (http:// www.mcdu.unt.edu) and an opportunity to discuss future directions for MARC and cataloging practices in the context of FRBR, RDA, and XML. The study's results provide a needed empirical basis to inform MARC's future.
Speakers: Dr. William E. Moen, Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texas; Dr. Shawne D. Miksa, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texas; Sally H. McCallum, Chief, Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress"