Code4Lib 2008: MARCThing
Casey Durfee from LibraryThing talked to us about MARCThing.
Casey started off by letting us know that LibraryThing cared about high quality data (something we could have all guessed just by using the tool and seeing all of the amazing updates that have been coming out recently). That said, he doesn’t think that anyone except for librarians should have to look at a MARC record (here he showed us a traditional MARC record). Casey feels that we should be able to work with MARC data in other formats like XML (here he showed us the XML version of the MARC record). This got a few giggles from the audience because the average non-programmer, non-librarian looking at those two screens sees gobbly-gook either way! The fact is that we want our patrons (most of whom are average folks) to be able to view our data in pretty easily readable interfaces.
Inspirations
Casey shared with us his inspirations for the creating the MARCThing app.
- Solr
- Universal feed parser – can take the worse rss and clean it up no matter what
- Eventlet — allows you to run tens of thousands of processes within a single thread
- django, ruby on rails, etc.
Other Info
Casey talked about the zen of standards. The more rules you have the more it’s going to get screwed up - the only standard that anyone will follow is the one with no rules! I love this. I actually was recording a podcast yesterday where we were talking about cataloging and the changes that need to be made - my comment was the same as it has always been - you need fewer and/or less convoluted rules! I’ve found that these rules lead to less quality data because people don’t want to waste the time referring back to the rules to see how to add special fields like provenance notes and the like.
Casey ended by saying “I’m not a librairan - but i play one on the internet.” He did remind us that LibraryThing does have several librarians on staff - and that their company is not a faceless corporation - they want to help everyone access their data because all of the data in the world doesn’t mean a thing if people can’t get at it!
Casey closed with a qoute that I cannot remember! The quote he showed us prompted him to alter it to read: “z39.50 is like the wind - we have plenty of it but it’s not where we need it when we need it - what we need is more fans” - I liked this so much I wrote it down - but forgot to write the other quote down! Maybe Casey is reading and can help me remember 
[update] The quote came from a Zen proverb! Thanks Joe for pointing it out to me [/update]
Conclusions
MARCThing is a step in the right direction and I can’t wait to see the code. Casey wrote on Thingology back in December that the code would be open source and would be available soon - so keep your eyes out for it.
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