Roy Tennant has revised his last year's death sentence for MARC. It may now,
writes he in LJ January 1004, die quietly of old age.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA371079
But of course, something must be done to open the secretive MARC world up. What
Tennant envisions is, however, rather daunting. He is airing LC's METS schema as
a concept to store multi-format data within one container.
Something like this will, IMHO, not be invading local systems. METS is meant as a
*Transfer Syntax*, not as an internal database schema (the same was true for MARC
when it was first designed). Think of updating complexities! What's needed is
import and export facilities that can ingest and generate, for example, ONIX data
or METS-wrapped stuff or XML tagged data in general. As long as a system can
ingest and generate everything that comes along or is asked for, its internal
structure is nobody else's business. Be it MARC or whatever.
In principle, all that's needed for a local system is the capability to ingest
and generate MARC - which all of them are already doing - AND a conversion
software that can switch between MARC and everything else. This intermediary
converter tool would (ideally) be completely independent of local systems and
thus be universally applicable. Not a very new idea though.
Regards, B.E.
Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel. +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX -5836
e-mail [log in to unmask]
