----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce C Johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 8:10 AM
Subject: In "American Libraries"


> Does everyone agree that we should immediately replace the MARC 21
> format with XML and immediately radically re-write AACR2 to be an
> input manual for XML?  As Chair of one of the standards making bodies
> most directly affected by this rather radical suggestion, I'm curious
> to hear whether there is a groundswell of support for this course of
> action.

I'm surprized at the suggestion that thinking about a successor to MARC
implies re-writing AACR2.  Since AACR2 is not in any sense an input manual
for MARC, it mustn't be assumed to be an input manual for any successor
format either.  AACR informed much of the original logic of the MARC record
and one can assume that AACR2 will inform much of the logic of the successor
format.

While I don't think that we need *urgently* to replace MARC since the
existing corpus of records is too large to enable us to do anything with
other than a medium- to long-term timeframe, I do believe that the
disadvantages of continuing to use MARC are beginning to outweigh the
advantages. We are rapidly moving to a world that puts a web browser in your
cell phone.  I believe that in this world we need son of MARC for which
there is native support in browsers and which maps rather better onto the
relational and object databases that bibliographic systems are migrating to.
Otherwise the bibliographic systems this community has spent billions on
developing, installing and supporting are likely to become museum pieces.

While MARC originally had an intellectual elegance, 30 years of continual
minor changes and additions, not all of which were as well thought out as
they might be, and 30 years of grandfathering existing practice has led to a
pretty incoherent data structure. MARC records are fiendishly difficult to
generate from and load into a reasonably well-normalized relational
database, because of all the exception handling that must be done.   MARC
also has fundamental problems, such as its inability to support in
hierarchical records in any rational way.

I am therefore in favour of an effort to start the design and specification
of a successor format to MARC.  And would love to participagte in such an
effort.   Migration will, of course, have to be an important (possibly the
most important) consideration in the specification work.

J. Zeeman
CGI, Ottawa