In 2002 Roy Tennant declared "MARC Must Die". Today the MARC 21 format is still the workhorse of library metadata. Even our "Next Generation Library Systems" heavily rely on this standard from the ‘60s. This boot camp will give an introduction to this arcane standard. Topics will be:
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Structure of MARC 21 records and their different serializations (MARC, MARCXML, MARCMaker, ALEPSEQ, ...)
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Validation of MARC 21 records and common errors
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Statistic analysis of MARC 21 data sets
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Conversion of MARC 21 records
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Metadata extraction from MARC 21 records
This bootcamp is aimed at systems librarians, metadata librarians and data managers. For most of the tasks we will use command line tools like catmandu, marcvalidate, yaz-marcdump and xmllint, so participants should be familiar with command line interfaces (CLI) and have a basic knowledge of library metadata. For exercises a notebook is required. You could use a VirtualBox image with preinstalled tools (see VM) or install all tools by yourself (see Software). Participants could bring their own MARC 21 datasets to work with.
- Henriette Avram (1975): MARC; its History and implications. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002993527
- Bernhard Eversberg (1999): Was sind und was sollen Bibliothekarische Datenformate urn:nbn:de:gbv:084-1103231323
- Roy Tennant (2002): MARC Must Die. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=marc-must-die
- William E. Moen, Penelope Benardino (2003): Assessing Metadata Utilization: An Analysis of MARC Content Designation Use https://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/download/745/741.pdf
- Karen Smith-Yoshimura, Catherine Argus, Timothy J. Dickey, Chew Chiat Naun, Lisa Rowlinson de Oritz & Hugh Taylor (2010): Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2010/2010-06.pdf
- Roy Tennant (2013-2018): MARC Usage in WorldCat http://roytennant.com/proto/groundtruthing/ (no longer available)
- Péter Király (2019): Validating 126 million MARC records 10.1145/3322905.3322929
- Péter Király (2019): Measuring Metadata Quality 10.13140/RG.2.2.33177.77920