MARC is the bibliographic data format libraries have shared catalogue records in since the 1960s, maintained by the Library of Congress. Its successor effort, BIBFRAME, re-expresses the same domain as linked data. MARC remains the working format of library systems worldwide.
MARC
MARC is the oldest machine-readable data standard in this catalog, and it predates most of the ideas the rest of the entries assume. It was designed for magnetic tape, it is still in daily production use, and it made the shared cataloguing economy possible — one library catalogues a book, every other library reuses the record.
- Fields and subfields - A numeric-tag structure that is unreadable at a glance and unambiguous to a machine.
- Shared cataloguing - The economic point: catalogue once, reuse everywhere.
- Z39.50 and successors - The retrieval protocols built to move MARC records between systems.
- BIBFRAME - The linked-data successor, adopted slowly because MARC still works.
MARC is a useful corrective to the assumption that machine-readable interoperability is recent. Libraries were exchanging structured records over a shared standard decades before the web, which is context for the finding in The State of Education & EdTech APIs that the library and scholarly half of education out-publishes the classroom half. That habit is sixty years old.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Education & EdTech APIs
Libraries were exchanging structured records decades before the web — context for why the scholarly and library half of education out-publishes the classroom half.
