Radiohead and the death of MARC cataloging
A year and a half ago – without any librarians seeming to notice – the MARC cataloging standard officially became obsolete. For years now librarians have noted that MARC is great for describing books but not other media types. The problem lies largely in the fact that MARC and AACR2 are geared to describing single, owned, and published material (i.e. monographs). Moreover, most libraries still focus almost exclusively on 
purchasing books. But the internet, the abundance of multimedia formats, and their meteoric expansion have slowly eaten away at our old-steady reading partner.
It comes as no surprise that there are millions of resources online that are valuable to patrons. The deal is that most libraries don’t catalog them because: a) they don’t control their management b) they might go down at any second and c) they aren’t published. Up until this point these reasons have remained valid. Obviously, if you don’t own a resource it doesn’t make sense to treat it like like you paid good money for it. It’s equally stupid to waste time and energy listing something that isn’t authoritative or might disappear at the whim of some Cheeto eating webmaster.
Enter Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”
The British rock band released it’s seventh album straight to the internet via digital download in 2007. Interesting, no? Despite the fact that the band eventually released the album on CD it’s worth asking a question, “what if Radiohead had decided to ignore their record company? What if they never sold “In Rainbows” on CD-Rom?” Interestingly enough, to this day OCLC, the largest unified catalog on the planet does not have an obvious MARC cataloging record available. Libraries have taken the cheap way out and cataloged the CD that they bought! Considering that the album received very positive reviews this constitutes a gaping hole in our collective methodologies. It is quite possible that next time libraries are going to be left out. Worse yet, it could mean that our patrons aren’t going get what they want.
I’m not saying that it will be easy to fix this problem. Providing access to a digital resource requires specific tools and specific technological skills. Fixing or replacing MARC is even more problematic! Nonetheless, librarians don’t have a much of a choice about what to do. Digital resources aren’t going anywhere soon and the good old days are gone for sure. An airbag may have saved Thom Yorke’s life once but he’s shown that unless libraries get their act together we all may be dead.
12. January 2009 at 11:15
“Libraries have taken the cheap way out and cataloged the CD that they bought!”
Uh, this is what librarians always do. They catalog the ’stuff’ that their acquisitions staff purchases, or that their collection development librarians request added to the catalog, be it cds, websites, monographs, serials, etc. Unless you can find some rogue cataloguer whose mission is just to catalog anything that has ever been produced.
12. January 2009 at 13:34
I’d like to see some cataloging for a digital album which is no longer available from the original source and which would be technically (and legally) challenging for a library to distribute digitally.
Also LC has over 80,000 records for electronic resources.
12. January 2009 at 19:05
James,
You bring up a really good point. There are plenty of records for electronic resources out there. Still, there are absolutely zero for this version of “In Rainbows.” What if it was the only format available? Sure, you could fudge a MARC record to catalog it, but logistically how does that even work? What do the rules say on the matter? Then there is, like you said, the distribution issue…
Now, maybe MARC can be updated to deal with this but it still presents some very real problems. We’re operating with a Monograph paradigm and that’s not what we are dealing with.
—-
Gina,
Hate to say it, but I’ve caught myself doing the same thing before too. :)
13. January 2009 at 07:34
I did some searching and found this: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/soundrec.pdf
See page 12
There seems the be a conflict between “electronic resource” and “sound recording”. Really I suppose the question might be, What do we do when all of our sound recordings are electronic resources? (The answer seems to be to treat them as electronic resources.)
I have found some cataloging for streaming digital albums (OCLC # 71365629, for example), but I do agree that with the increasing importance of digital media there should be more proactive cataloging of these things.
A more interesting example might be the new Brian Eno and David Byrne album (http://www.everythingthathappens.com/), which, unlike the Radiohead album, appears to be streaming permanently. And creative commons resources especially could benefit from this attention, since the distribution issue is less of a problem. See OCLC record # 71365629 for an interesting example.
-James
note that is the same “James” from above, I’ve just decided to enter my whole name to increase my Google vanity score :)
13. January 2009 at 22:43
No problem with the vanity score. I think mine’s through the roof thanks to a bunch of old XC races I ran in High School and undergrad. And thanks for the new music too! I’m just interested to see where things go in the next 10-20 years.