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Introduction
In October 2015, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a nonprofit cooperative organization which maintains WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog (OPAC), printed out and shipped its last batch of catalog cards. OCLC’s president and CEO Skip Pritchard joked, “We were going to have a monk doing calligraphy on the last card” (Gearino, 2015), reflecting on how dated the practice of recording bibliographic information on printed cards had become in the age of computers. However, not just card catalogs have become obsolete. When Henriette Avram invented the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) standards in the 1960s, she was translating the card catalog into a format that computers could read and distribute. With all bibliographic records being born digital a near half century later, MARC has caused many critics to wonder if OPACs need a new standard. In answer to these critics, in 2012 the Library of Congress contracted Zepheira, a data management company, and began the bibliographic framework initiative (BIBFRAME). To those working with catalog records, this initiative is a drastic change. What exactly is BIBFRAME? Will it replace MARC? This paper hopes to introduce BIBFRAME, including a discussion of why it is needed, its history and the use of BIBFRAME editor to create a record. It will also include an update of the status of the BIBFRAME test project and BIBFRAME 2.0.
Why BIBFRAME?
An early and probably one of the most famous attacks on MARC came from Roy Tennant in his 2002 paper “MARC must die.” He argued MARC was from an era when memory, storage and processing capabilities required a minimalistic approach to data, now they are “ubiquitous and cheap” (Tennant, 2002). Tennant also explained MARC’s format made it difficult to read the record, since it was designed to capture a card in text string form. When capturing the table of contents, Tennant noted, its hierarchical nature is flattened to fit MARC’s needs. Tennant pointed out MARC’s proprietary nature, forcing libraries to use only software from vendors who cater to libraries. As of his writing in 2002, Tennant felt XML was more flexible and more suited for cataloging. Tennant concluded clinging to outdated software would make it increasingly difficult to meet their clients’ needs (Tennant, 2002). Two years later, Tennant created a...