Daily Archives: October 20, 2002

LJ has the article MARC Must Die by Roy Tennant. He says that the numbered tags are a problem. I like to think of them as language independent. He suggests that XML may be a replacement. However, XML records are very much larger and XML only specifies the carrier not the tags and content of those tags. There is a MARC XML standard available, but that is only useful for some tasks, I’d hate to work with that monster. Granularity is a problem with implementation, not MARC. If a cataloger does not use the necessary fields and subfields, it is poor cataloging, not a problem with MARC. I’ll not go through the other arguments against MARC. The ability to nest fields may be useful. Rather than moving to XML, I’d like to see a MARC-like implementation of FRBR . – David Bigwood