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> > This is no justification for not doing things better. (And I'd love to > know what the hard bits are; always interesting to hear from various > people as to what they think are the *real* problems of library > problems, as opposed to any other problem they have) > The problem is you have to deal with legacy systems and data. That's as real as it gets. That this is somehow a shortcoming peculiar to the library community is nonsense. Just changing the way dates were stored so that Y2K wasn't a big deal caused total chaos in the business world for years and required many billions of dollars worth of development. We still use 4 digit numeric PINs to access bank accounts. If I created some crummy website that used that level of protection, people would rightly call me an idiot. Eliminating MARC and basing systems on a completely different data structure would have far more reaching impact on system design than twiddling with a couple date digits or allowing something more secure than 4 digits to protect access to thousands of dollars. So as crappy as our systems are, I don't buy we're so much worse than everyone else out there. There is always the issue of developing the new standard in the first place, convincing all the vendors to adopt it, and retrofitting the systems to work with it. Problems are easiest to solve when it's someone else's job to make it happen. kyle -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Kyle Banerjee Digital Services Program Manager Orbis Cascade Alliance [log in to unmask] / 503.877.9773