Academic Librarianship Today by Todd Gilman

Author:Todd Gilman [Gilman, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.1 AACR2 elements, elements governed by other standards, and MARC containers

MARC was created in the ’60s. Yes, the 1960s. Back when the civil rights movement had reached its height and NASA was aiming for the moon and lots of people apparently wore really nice suits and drank cocktails every day and computer programming was still largely relegated to women (Henn 2014). Sponsored by the Library of Congress, built by a team of programmers led by Henriette Avram, and implemented on a historically enormous scale, MARC proved to be a brilliant solution for library automation needs (Avram 2003).

But today, when information does not really count unless it is actionable on the web, MARC has long outlived its usefulness. It might be best to think of MARC as a sort of ancestor of XML—a way of sticking bits of data into containers so they can be stored and shared. Those containers all have labels on them, with smaller containers within the large ones. An application built to read MARC knows how to store, use, and display those containers. But of course, the problem now is that only a handful of library applications designed by vendors like Innovative or Ex Libris can read MARC. No web technologies know or care about MARC containers. It is a completely arcane format. It was once the key that set our data free, yet it has become the prison that keeps millions of catalog records from joining the rest of the information world.

How is it possible that libraries still do not have their data on the web? We are well in to the twenty-first century already. Almost any information that would be free in print is also freely available on the web. A Google search can help me find out how many Elizabeths were christened in Canterbury in the 1500s,5 but it cannot help me find a baby name book in my local library.

Although we are woefully behind, catalogers really are working on this. In 2013, most major academic libraries adopted the replacement for AACR2, called Resource Description and Access (RDA). This is a descriptive standard like AACR2, but it was designed with several new principles in mind that will help us to move into a linked data environment.

The first of these principles is that we should be working from a well-drawn map of the bibliographic universe, much like the periodic table is a well-drawn map of the chemical universe. Every chemical element is there, defined and arranged in a logical, connected way. This arrangement supports scientists in their practical work with chemistry—it allows them to name and refer to and make use of all the substances listed there.

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) along with their companion FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data, usually just lumped in with FRBR in cataloging discussions) are mappings in the same spirit—a conceptual framework that attempts to name and place every entity in the “universe of discourse” (Riva and Žumer 2015, 4) and define the relationships between them.

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