The Canonical Entity (of the past) — the card catalog
MARC was not created for online catalogs; it was created for card catalogs. It’s a fundamental flaw. Readable reformatting of MARC isn’t much better
The classic bib record
- Â a collection of statements
- taken from the piece itself
- sometimes enhanced w inferred parentheticals
- or additional statements not on the piece (eg subject headings)
- where punctuation, which may or may not be present is used (inconsistently) for structure
- We’re dealing with uncontrolled text strings that are only loosely connected to anything else