Cataloging, RDA, and MARC

There has been a great deal of talk recently about MARC and RDA - which should not be surprising to those of you all who are catalogers (which is a few of us). Jason Thomale's recent article in Code4Lib, Interpreting MARC: Where’s the Bibliographic Data? was an excellent semi-outsider look at cataloging from a programmer/systems perspective. It has sparked some great discussion around the internet and has, yet again, raised the question - why should we go to RDA for an input standard when the format (MARC) is almost comically outdated?

(MARC record for a book I created recently. See how confusing that is - and this is for the format best suited for MARC and AARC2.)

As Thomale points out in his article, MARC is over 40 years old now, and was initially designed to make the information stored on paper catalog cards readable by machines, and printable by those same machines. Frankly, the card catalog has disappeared almost entirely from all libraries, replaced by the OPAC. Why should we still be using a metadata format that is linked to those cards?

I think the ALA has the feeling that RDA will somehow transform cataloging from a very book centered process to a more general form of metadata generation. Just think about how Byzantine it is to catalog an electronic resource in MARC and AACR2. I'll freely admit that RDA will help to make that process easier, but MARC is the real culprit. It has simply outlived its usefulness.

So what, then, are we to do? Well, not to be dismissive of what RDA (and the incorporation of FRBR) represents, but I think it's time for ALA, LC, and the Joint Steering Committee to scrap further work on RDA and develop a symbiotic input standard and format - much like MARC and AACR2 are today. One buttresses and supports the other, and allows for simpler and more effective description of information resources of all formats, and designed not to be effective just for the next 5 years, but for the next 50 years. Invite other experts in programming and metadata to contribute as well, ensuring that the metadata we generate can be used by people beyond the library community.

If such a thing were to happen, my only question would be, "How can I help?" In the meantime I suppose my question for you, reader, is "What can I do now to foster the changes we need to be more effective catalogers, assisting our patrons find the information resources they need?"