Me and MARC are Back on Speaking Terms!

Understanding MARC

After reading about MARC I was extremely confused.  To be honest I thought it was stupid and would likely serve no use for me in the future so why lose sleep over it.  I even considered not trying to complete the activity at the end of lesson six.  However, despite my attitudes towards MARC I tried the activity and was surprised at the value in it.

When I went on the Library of Congress site I entered in the title of the first custom course ware selection entitled, The Tale of Despereaux.  I compared the catalogue information to the information on the front and back of the cover.  I found all of the information to be very accurate.  I then moved on to conquer my fear and hatred of MARC.  When I clicked on the MARC Tags description of the book I was surprised to easily recognize several of the fields.  Immediately I remembered that 245 represented the title, 260 represented the publisher and 100 represented the author.  Based on these recognitions I realized that all the 200 fields represented key book information.  However I was still confused by what was represented by the 00_’s, 9__’s and the 0_0’s.  Even though I did not understand all of the MARC fields and tags, I was pleased that I recognized and understood a few.

With my new found confidence I tried searching The X Ray Picture Book of Dinosaurs & Other Prehistoric Creatures.  The MARC Tags for this book once again overwhelmed me.  While I once again recognized the 200’s and 100, there were a lot more other tags in the 600, 700, 800 and 900’s.  Furthermore there were additional letters and codes which were completely lost on me.  I realize now that as somebody who does not work in a library, understanding MARC in its entirety will likely never occur.  However, I am glad that I can at least recognize the key tags for items such as title, author, publisher and key descriptive information.

Creating My Own MARC Record

I decided to create a MARC Record for Animal Farm by George Orwell.  I included all of the information using the tags which I remembered from the readings as well as a few I looked up using the reading on MARC.

020         ISBN 0-14-012670-8

100         Orwell, George

240 $1   English

        $f    1945

245         Animal Farm

260         Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd

300         5 mm.

Once I completed my own MARC record I compared it to the actual one on the Library of Congress website.  I was surprised at how much of it I had correct.  As a result of my success, I feel a little bit better about MARC moving forward in the course.