Over the course of my LS 566 blogging, I hope to be able to touch on some basic metadata concepts, schemas, standards, and other tools that are important to the library and metadata fields. For the first of these such posts, I'd like to focus on an integral component of metadata in a library setting- MARC.
MARC, short for MAchine-Readable Cataloging is a data format standard first developed during the 1960s, and still used today in its MARC 21 form. MARC provided information professionals with a format which enabled the creation, use, and transmission of electronic catalog records for libraries, and thus made the use of computerized library catalogs, and the sharing of catalog records, viable. As both a national and international standard for bibliographic data, MARC has had a tremendous on the cataloging world, and is virtually synonymous with the concept of library catalog records.
In form, MARC is a series of 3-digit, numerical fields, or tags, with each such tag representing a piece of bibliographic information, such as the: title, author, or subjects for a given work. Tags are modified through the use of indicators and subfields, which allow the entry of additional information, or denote that the record be used or read in a certain way (i.e. indicators can be used to prevent a record from being searchable in the library catalog, while another tells the computer to skip a certain number of characters in the entry, etc...).
A very simple example of a single MARC tag:
245 14 $aThe Three Musketeers / $cby Alexandre Dumas ; with an introduction by Allan Massie
In this example:
-245 is the field for the title of the book
-14 is a series of two indicators: 1 noting that the title should be added to the catalog, the 4 that the first 4 characters of the entry ("The" and the space after) should be skipped (articles like "The" and "A" make organizing and searching for materials are problematic, and so are ignored by the catalog
-$a is the subfield in which the title of the work is entered
-$c is the subfield for the statement of responsibility, which in this case, includes the author and writer of the introduction
Though complicated to use and understand, at times, MARC has had a tremendous impact on the development of modern cataloging. While it has served the library community well for the better part of 40 years, the possibility of change is on the horizon. Among other factors, a new set of cataloging rules (RDA) is steering the cataloging world in a new direction, and it is questionable whether MARC is the best fit going forward. I hope to touch on this subject in a future blog.
For more information about the MARC standard, there are two great resources online: the MARC Standards page, through the Library of Congress, and OCLC's Bibliographic Formats and Standards page.
Good description of MaRC!
ReplyDeleteIt's also good to add some of the reasons why MaRC won't be with us in a Web era due to reasons of its difficulty to deploy outside the closed environment of the library cataloging community versus the open organizing community of the Web"
1) it uses literals as data: that is, what is store is what is displayed. This is why authority files (and records) are needed in addition to the bibliographic data contained in bibliographic files.
2) all field data is left anchored: that means we need the convolution of indicator fields in tags such as 245 to instruct the search tool how many non-filing characters to skip when storing the data string "The Shining" (and why when you're searching a catalog, you told to leave off any definite or indefinite articles.
Both of these are legacies of the 60s/70s era computing environment that a new start with Bibframe.org encoding can, among other things, overcome....
--Dr. MacCall
Some really great points to consider. MaRC definitely is getting a bit "long in the tooth," but I wonder how readily a new format will be accepted. When adjusting from a format that has been in use for so long, I fear that we may see several iterations of standards come and go before we are able to settle on the next MaRC-like format. While many fields are eager to push the technological envelope, and are fine with ever-changing standards, I question whether the library field truly prefers to be so cutting edge that it is forced to adopt new standards every few years. There seems to be a disconnect, of sorts, between trying to ensure the permanence of descriptive information, and the desire to explore newer, better information technologies. And that doesn't even necessarily consider the differing preferences between the library-centered professionals and the metadata-centered groups.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight.
I believe reading about different schemas is harder than if you can actually train and work with one. I have worked with MARC a little (but not enough to really know a whole lot). I did copy cataloging until we could hire someone else to fill that position. I don't have much training as the person who trained me didn't explain much except what information to put in specific fields (author, title, etc...). Other than that, I just had to verify the information. However, now that I have had a bit of a working introduction, I feel like I could learn it better. I am at least familiar with how it looks and sort of how it works. I am less intimidated at the possibility getting more in depth training of MARC than anything else.
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