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Showing posts from April, 2014

Metadata Update #18 - RDA for Music and thoughts about FRBR

I recently attended a joint ALA/MLA webinar on music cataloguing for RDA. I'm not going to use this blog post to talk about the content of that webinar but I do want to mention an impression that was made upon me. MARC is a linear, two-dimensional container for metadata. It's worked very well for a very long time and it still works well. However, in our current computing and communications environment we can do better. In a world of linked data, big data and structured data, our MARC records start to show both their strengths and their limitations. OCLC's project to convert MARC records to linked data shows MARC's strengths. The fact that such an old 20th century standard has stood the test of time to be transformed into a new life in the 21st century is a testament to the technical minds who have developed MARC as a metadata container over the decades. I have spoken to many cataloguers, and I am included in this category, who are frustrated by the fact that