It looks like a classic case of “If your not with us, you’re against us“. But I would like to try to reconcile both opposing parties anyway.

I have received a couple of other reactions outside of this blog as well, both on line (via twitter among others) and off line, and I had some conversations about MARC and PICA+ formats with colleagues. All this has been cause to refine my opinion slightly.

First, a couple of experienced cataloger colleagues have convinced me that PICA+ is not always better than MARC. Like always, both have their pros and cons, as undoubtedly will apply to the MARC-MAB relationship as well.

Second, I must thank my valued IGeLU colleague Michele Newberry for her very clear description of the historical circumstances of the birth of MARC and her experience of many years.
Michele says that it is not fair to judge MARC from today’s perspective only. And I have to admit that she is right. In the early days of MARC it was a very useful and efficient tool in the circumstances of those days.
She also emphasises that MARC was intended as a communications format, which was subsequently used as storage format by ILS vendors.
Michele concludes by saying that she would “fully support a new communications format and discussion of how we get there”. “I just wish we could do it without making MARC the enemy“.
I hereby apologise to everybody who I may have offended by my attack on MARC. I have no intention of discrediting its usefulness in the past and present.

However I stick with my opinion that in a digital web environment it is not an efficient storage and exchange format for bibliographic metadata anymore. We should aim at bringing about a new general efficient and flexible bibliographic format suitable for future developments. As far as I’m concerned this could be MARC22.
MARC can be adapted, this has been done before. As an example: in 2003 a proposal has been made to replace the 773 subfield g tag by either a subfield 773$q, or a new tag 363, with subfields for all levels contained in the 773$g subfield free-text string. Both options are available now. The 363 tag appears to have been accepted as “Normalized Date and Sequential Designation (R)“. But as long as this new field is not used, it has no value. I expect that AACR2 still does not require using 363, but I am not an expert. OCLC recently stated that implementation of 363 is “under consideration”.

Someone pointed out to me recently, that all the problems associated with a massive migration by libraries around the world from MARC to something else, whatever it may be, will be avoided in the case that we all will migrate to one of the new SaaS models of cataloguing (Ex Libris URM, OCLC WorlCat Web, etc.). We will see…

MARC was succinct. Tags were short and fixed length. Fixed fields and subfields were encoded for maximum meaning in minimal space.

MARC is a communications format designed to support the communication of cataloging information between what were, at the time, a very, very small number of entities – mostly LC and other national libraries, a few universities that were doing local development, and a nascent bibliographic utility industry — all of which was geared to supporting printing catalog cards since online systems were still decades away. MARC had to support the cataloging rules (pre-AACR2)and the realities of printed cards (thus names in inverted form and data to comply with LC filing rules). The uptake of MARC for internal storage by ILS vendors was largely driven by the customer libraries’ RFPs and by the reality that computing power to do data conversion wasn’t always available. It also vastly pre-dated any form of keyword indexing thus not allowing for normalized data.

It was also driven by the realities that catalogers found that MARC-speak facilitated communication among themselves; communication that might not have been possible if all the local systems had stored bibliographic data in WDC. Everyone was learning this new stuff all at once and trying to learn from the originators and each other. If LC’s 100, had been my “Author” data element, your “Main entry-personal name” and OCLC’s “WDC-1″, we would have had a much harder time sharing what we were learning and helping each other create all this standardized data. Referencing the 100 field short cut a lot of “what are you talking about?” in communications. And remember, most of this communications was in person and in print format that took a lot longer to reach an audience since it pre-dated email, WWW, blogs, and Twitter by 30 years!

I fully agree that MARC has been very badly managed regarding the 773 field. I’ve felt this since the early 90s when we started loading journal article citation data and tried to create a workable TOC index to all our data — parsing that field is just ridiculous and and would have been so much easier with some standard encoding much earlier.

Having said all this, I’d fully support a new communications format and discussion of how we get there. I just wish we could do it without making MARC the enemy – it has been a reliable workhorse that has been absolutely key to our getting where we are in both systems and magnitude of bibliographic data. I do regret that the good features of other MARCs worldwide were not incorporated. And not just worldwide. The WLN system (long since absorbed by OCLC) had a 3rd indicator – which was wonderful for handling non-filing indicators for the subfield t of 7XX fields. A loss we constantly decry when trying to integrate 245 fields with titles in author added entries.