As I was walking to work this morning, a comment I heard last week came to mind: “In five years, MARC won’t even be around.” When I heard this statement I thought (with much resignation), “MARC is never going to go away. We have too much invested in it.”
I just finished reading Roy Tennant’s article in LIBRARYJOURNAL.com, “Bibliographic Control Future” (April 15, 2007). In this article he writes about the first of three meetings organized by the Library of Congress’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control: “Users and Uses of Bibliographic Data” which was held at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California on March 8, 2007. A summary of that meeting is here.
A couple of things in Tennant’s article stick out in my mind:
- Tennant has been saying “MARC must die” for about five years (read his original article here)
- William Moen (UNT) and his research team evaluated the entire OCLC database (over 56 million records!) and found that “only ten fields and about 20 subfields were commonly used.” The preliminary analysis of commonly-used MARC elements can be read here.
I have been cataloging for over nine years, and I know that cataloging is an expensive business. I’ve often wondered about the amount of time and effort we put into creating that “perfect” bibliographic description. Why is it so bad to take an “is this record good enough?” approach to cataloging? The bottom line should be “will the users be able to find this record?” Does that make me less of a cataloger to say that? But I digress.
I wonder if we are going to miss the boat by thinking, as I did last week, that MARC is never going to go away. Is that part of the problem? And speaking of problems, I think it’s important to remember that it’s not just MARC (think AACR2, ISBD, etc.). I’m encouraged that we are thinking more seriously about the “future of bibliographic control,” but I wonder if we are going to spend too much time (we are catalogers, after all…) thinking, debating the issues, and writing papers and reports instead of focusing on viable solutions. It’s good that we have concrete “proof” to substantiate our claims that change is needed, but how much more proof do we need? Haven’t we been hearing for years that our users can’t find anything in our catalogs? That should be enough proof in and of itself. Why are we spending all of this time creating perfect bibliographic descriptions when our users can’t find anything? I don’t think it’s all the users’ fault.
Maybe I’m impatient, but it seems like we are dragging our feet. True, we have PCC’s core record standards and CONSER’s standard record (soon…?). (Hmm… I should mention MODS here, shouldn’t I?) And I’m not saying that we don’t need authority control or that we should just let our users tag everything. There just has to be some middle (or lower) ground.
Are Google and Amazon really the bad guys, or can we learn something from them? I don’t have the answers and it’s time for bed now.
To be continued…
