I would tend to agree with Joe Zeeman on this one. MFHD, like most of
the other standards that make up MARC, is a *communication* standard and
has been created to enable the exchange of holdings data in the same way
that we have come to expect bibliographic data to be exchanged by MARC21
bibliographic. While many vendors talk MARC, not all vendors walk MARC
internally, as it is really not a very flexible system to accomplish
what they are trying to do with a library's data. MARC has
variable-length fields, something apparently quite difficult to handle
when storing records as binary blobs or even in tables within standard
databases like Oracle, Sybase or Informix.
So long as the vendor can support import and export of full MARC bib,
holdings, authority and other formats, and can enable staff data entry
of all needed information at the indicator, field and subfield level,
I'm not really too concerned with what their storage mechanism is or how
bibliographic, holdings, or authority information displays to staff. If
you have ever viewed a raw MARC record, you will no doubt realize that
it is not the wonderful warm and fuzzy entity that we would want to work
directly in. This is why we create edit templates for this stuff,
sometimes with the tagged display that we have come to think of as MARC,
sometimes with field names in the natural language of staff (or at least
what the vendor thinks is our natural language!). Consider the OCLC
display of MARC leader and fixed field values, mimicked by many ILS
vendors for editing purposes. Not the standard (especially the 007),
but you can still get the standard out when you need to output records.
My advice on MFHD is to make sure that the functionality of the standard
is available and that your data can be transported to another system
when the current one dies.
_______________________________________________________________________
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Charley Pennell mailto:[log in to unmask]
Head, Cataloging Department voice: (919)515-2743
NCSU Libraries, Box 7111 fax: (919)515-7292
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7111
Adjunct Librarian, Memorial University of Newfoundland
World Wide Web: http://www.ibiblio.org/hillwilliam/chuckhome.html
Cataloguer's Toolbox: http://www.mun.ca/library/cat/
_______________________________________________________________________
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
|