Who needs MARC? Posted on May 15th, 2009Lukas Koster Why use a non-normalised metadata exchange format for suboptimal data storage? © leah the librarian This week I had a nice chat with André Keyzer of Groningen University library and Peter van Boheemen of Wageningen University Library who attended OCLC’s Amsterdam Mashathon 2009. As can be expected from library technology geeks, we got talking about bibliographic metadata formats, very exciting of course. The question came up: what on earth could be the reason for storing bibliographic metadata in exchange formats like MARC? Being asked once at an ELAG conference about the bibliographic format Wageningen University was using in their home grown catalog system, Peter answered: “WDC” ….”we don’t care“.Exactly my idea!
As a matter of fact I think I may have used the same words a couple of times in recent years, probably even at ELAG2008.