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.