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by pianohacker 746 days ago
I cut my programmer teeth on Koha years and years ago. Still one of the warmest open-source communities I've ever been involved in, especially to a shy teenager with a lot of opinions.

Great to see new faces in the community, sad to see the sheer insanity of MARC21 still causing chaos. MARCXML is gonna make it obsolete Any Day Now!
1 comments
quink 746 days ago
MARCXML is just a new format to encode what's the vast majority of the MARC 21 standard (or for that matter any other MARC variety).

BIBFRAME is gonna make it obsolete Any Day Now!

("any day now" in this sector means that librarians have been talking about it for two decades and in about two decades something might actually happen)

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tingletech 746 days ago
I do wish the community had leaned into the MODS direction vs going over to RDF.
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quink 746 days ago
Yeah I don't know what the sell is there... throw away the fidelity of your data when WEMI/FRBR/BIBFRAME/semantic web is coming any ~year~ decade now, soon (lol), while re-learning everything, definitely going out to tender because your current system won't do it and shift your processes and integrations. All so you can end up halfway to DC, yeah no.

The reason libraries don't do cataloguing any longer anywhere near as much hasn't got much to do with MARC 21 being hard.

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tingletech 746 days ago
The fidelity seems pretty good, at least if you convert to MARCXML and then use the XSLT from Library of Congress to generate it. IIRC it has record types for all the FRBR levels. It is also not flat like DC. It was a joy to work with from a record aggregator perspective, especially if you were generating it from MARC. You can even put the full table of contents into it. At the time that one of my colleagues wrote the "MARC Must Die" article (at least if I remember correctly) the teams working on RDA and MODS had a lot of overlap and MODS was being designed with the era's cataloging theory in mind. There was a moment in time where it seemed like a "new MARC" might go in that direction.

Having catalogers or metadata librarians write directly in MODS XML by hand never made sense (although some folks tried this), but as far as something usable to ship around I'd rather get MODS than MARC or dublin core. I really don't want to have to query a triple store to aggregate records.

Catalogers ideally would have tools that make it easy for them follow RDA/AACR2 descriptive practices without having to think about the details of MARC or MODS or linked data.

I've been out of the business for a couple of years, so I have not been following Library of Congress' BIBFRAME transition.

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