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.