Well, in a sense something like your idea is exactly what I proposed in
my article "A Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure for the
Twenty-First Century" in Library Hi Tech. For example, much of what I
want below is already in an ONIX XML record that many publishers are
making available. So why couldn't we have a METS record with an ONIX
package and a MARCXML or MODS package, and then be able to index and
display whatever we want? Thom can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was
my understanding that OCLC was remaking WorldCat to enable something
similar, as well as other capabilities. They created the "XWC"
(extended WorldCat) format that could contain MARC but was not
necessarily constrained by it.  But whether we have all the metadata in
one record in one system or whether we have two or more records in two
or more databases it seems completely obvious to me that we need to be
able to use many more metadata formats than MARC.
Roy

On Feb 18, 2005, at 10:43 AM, Ross Singer wrote:

> So wouldn't it make sense to store this information outside of the
> catalog?  As long as you have something to key off of, you can use the
> catalog for the MARC information and "Happy User-friendly Format" for
> the front-end view.
>
> Then some sort of OCLC service for brokering "Happy User-friendly
> Format" records could appear.
>
> I guess I'm not sure that trying to MARC non-ugly is a particularly
> useful exercise when we could just as easily create something else that
> isn't ugly that is referenced by MARC.
> -Ross.
>
> Roy Tennant wrote:
>
>> On Feb 15, 2005, at 10:57 AM, Hickey,Thom wrote:
>>
>>> It seems to me that your version -would- be possible to generate
>>> from a
>>> MARC record.
>>
>>
>> Perhaps, but I would want to see:
>>
>> * The title as it was printed on the book, not this lowercase business
>> * No "[electronic resource]" title field foolishness
>> * No mixing of author/editor and the title as we presently do in the
>> 245 field for some reason I still can't figure out
>>
>> We have more anachronistic practices in our catalogs than I think we
>> fully appreciate.
>> Roy
>>
>