Quoting James Weinheimer <weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com>:
While there is an undoubted loss in semantics, with the future
evolution of MARC format, we can ask: do such losses have any
practical consequences? Although I think many subfields (although
not the information) could disappear without any essential loss,
some will have important consequences to different communities.
Jim, this is much of the motivation for the work that I have been
doing to try to identify the actual "elements" of MARC21 -- elements
in the semantic sense, trying to ignore the MARC21 structure (which
results in much repetition, etc.) A report on my study is available in
the recent Code4Lib journal:
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/5468
One of the difficulties of deciding what we do and do not want to keep
in MARC, or what we want to move over to the RDA environment, is that
we have no dictionary of everything that MARC covers. For example,
what standard identifiers are available in MARC? They are scattered
all over the format, so it's hard to know. What about things like
language and date? Those appear in different fields with somewhat
different meanings.
My assumption is that a complete inventory of MARC elements is
essential for any move away from MARC. Unfortunately, I have gotten
now to the 1xx-8xx fields (the study so far is 00x and 0xx, that's
already pretty complex!) and may not have the energy to complete the
study on my own. However, what I have done so far at least sets down
some possible principles to follow.
I'm doing it all on the futurelib wiki so my process is as transparent
as I can make it:
http://futurelib.pbworks.com/w/page/29114548/MARC%20elements
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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m: 1-510-435-8234
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