"When MARC was created, the Beatles were a hot new group ..."
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. Since we will continue to work with MARC 21 in the coming years, this tutorial will give an introduction to MARC 21 with the following topics:
- MARC 21
- Introduction
- Record elements
- Serializations (MARCXML, MARCMaker, MARC-in-JSON, ALEPHSEQ)
- Tools
- Get MARC records
- Validation of MARC 21 records and common errors
- Statistical analysis of MARC 21 data sets
- Conversion of MARC 21 records
- Metadata extraction from MARC 21 records
This tutorial is intended for systems librarians, metadata librarians and data manager. For most of the tasks we will use command line tools like yaz-marcdump, marcstats, marcvalidate and catmandu. A VirtualBox image containing most of the required tools can be downloaded at the Catmandu project.
- Avram (1975): MARC; its History and implications. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002993527
- Eversberg (1999): Was sind und was sollen Bibliothekarische Datenformate urn:nbn:de:gbv:084-1103231323
- Tennant (2002): MARC Must Die. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=marc-must-die
- 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
- Tennant (2013-2018): MARC Usage in WorldCat http://roytennant.com/proto/groundtruthing/
- Király (2019): Validating 126 million MARC records 10.1145/3322905.3322929
- Király (2019): Measuring Metadata Quality 10.13140/RG.2.2.33177.77920