Re: Slightly OT: MARC

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Lars Heuer <[email protected]> wrote:
> From what I've read, the
>    010 tag: marks the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN)

Inconsistently used, doesn't contain all items, have no semantics,
ruled by one organisation, denotes record identity.

>    020 tag: marks the International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

Could have worked if it wasn't put into the hands of publishers. :)
Have you ever searched for a book by its ISBN only to find books
completely unrelated? Yeah, same ISBNs can be different books in
different countries, or same books with different covers, or same
author but different book, and on and on. You simply cannot rely on
ISBN.

But of course we can use both of these to *help* us create an identity
for a book. However, book identity is complex when you dig into
details about editions, publishers, covers, cut, run, measures, and so
on. This is why the library world created FRBR[1] back in 1993 which
has a model structure of Work -> Expression -> Manifestation -> Item,
and *this* is perfect for Topic Maps and a normalized MARC data set,
however the work done on this is slow, minimal, mostly unsupported and
not well understood by the library community as such.


regards,

Alex

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records
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