The US' Working Group of the Future of Bibliographic Control, as it examined technology for the future, wrote that the Library of Congress community's data carrier, MARC, is 'based on forty-year-old techniques for data management and is out of step with programming styles of today.'
The Working Group called for a format that will accommodate and distinguish expert-, automated-, and self-generated metadata, including annotations (reviews, comments and usage data). It agreed that MARC had served the library community well in the pre-web environment, but something new was now needed to implement the recommendations made in the Working Group's seminal report. In its recommendations, the Working Group called upon the Library of Congress to take action.
This same theme reportedly emerged from the recent test of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) conducted by the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress. The 26 test partners also noted that, were the limitations of the MARC standard lifted, the full capabilities of RDA would be more useful to the library community. Many of the libraries taking part in the test indicated that they had little confidence RDA changes would yield significant benefits without a change to the underlying MARC carrier. Several of the test organisations were especially concerned that the MARC structure would hinder the separation of elements and ability to use URLs in a linked data environment.
With these statements from two expert groups, the Library of Congress is committed to developing, in collaboration with librarians, standards experts, and technologists a new bibliographic framework that will serve the associated communities well into the future. Within the Library, staff from the Network Development and Standards Office (within the Technology Policy directorate) and the Policy and Standards Division (within the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access directorate) have been meeting with Beacher Wiggins (Director, ABA), Ruth Scovill (Director, Technology Policy) and Deanna Marcum (Associate Librarian for Library Services, Library of Congress) to craft a plan for proceeding with the development of a bibliographic framework for the future.
To access our daily STM news feed through your iPhone, iPad, or other smartphones, please visit www.myscoope.com for a mobile friendly reading experience.
