Why MARC is terrible but brilliant and you should be nice to yourself
MARC must die, right? Certainly if you’ve ever tried to computationally process it, you’ve been frustrated by the not-quite-structured data, the ways it just doesn’t play nice with the expectations of modern applications. I’m ready to grab my best pitchfork and line up with you, and yet – if you look at it in its historical context, MARC is amazing. Henriette Avram’s papers, as she grappled in public with this new format, are a problem-solving tour de force…she just wasn’t solving the same problems we’re solving today. We’ll walk through this collision of needs, illuminating why MARC is brilliant from a computational standpoint, even if it’s terrible from our computational standpoint. Hopefully along the way you’ll feel better about your own legacy code.
