Marc was a Good & Loyal Mule but Now It’s Time to Shoot It is a post over on the Future4catalogers blog that does an effective job at explaining why the library community should be focusing on using a new, more powerful (and easier to learn, use, explain, and mashup) metadata structure.
I suspect that part of the problem lies with people who don’t really know what a marc record looks like, and why it is nearly impossible to work with in its native form. From the essay:
To do anything with a Marc record, it must be disassembled and reconstituted in pieces. Even the displays we see as Marc workforms require this disassembly and reassembly to make it comprehensible to catalogers.
Most see the nicely formatted row-by-row marc view that can be seen on some library OPACs as well as cataloging software in our ILS platforms. If you have ever opened a pure marc file in a text editor, you would quickly conclude that locating and understanding information in the record is very challenging, and the thought of editing the record in this form is crazy talk.
If a good and robust metadata format were used instead, then the data could be arranged and edited in a wide variety of ways (including replication of the standard cataloging interface). Even better, however, is that one can open, view, and edit the record (or even a large group of records) within a text editor (though there are and will be many tools to streamline and simplify the process).
