Dreams of MARC?

The course called National, University, and Special Libraries met today, for the second time, at 8:30. It's a great bunch of students -- 16 total, who are in their third years. Until last year, all of the courses they took were in a group, with their 65 other classmates. Now, as third years, they are able to declare which speciality they'd like to pursue: they will either specialize to become librarians who will work in libraries or to become documentalists who will work in archives. There are more jobs for documentalists in corporate offices. Fewer jobs in libraries (fewer libraries) means fewer (but more highly-motivated) students self-selecting for the libraries option.

I'd gotten in touch with the woman teaching the "partner" course for the librarian option: School and Public Libraries. It turns out, we're on the same page in a lot of respects, so today was full speed ahead with introductory content in my class.

The students are very engaged and were asking a ton of questions. I know they all took Cataloging in their first and second years, so to answer one question, I brought up an element that we code in the fixed field of MARC records that are loaded into OCLC. The conversation then turned.

Then a few minutes later, I got another question: "Can we please talk about MARC records in this class?" "I'm sorry, WHAT?" "We only covered manual cataloging in our Cataloging course -- can we talk about MARC here, since you know so much about it?" Heads nodding throughout the room. "We know MARC is great for sharing information between libraries, but we don't know how it works."

I've been teaching MARC for at least 6 years. I've talked about teaching catalgoing at international conferences. The reaction is always the same, across the board: "Ugh." Enthousiam about the mark-up language for bibliographic materials devised by the Library of Congress in the 1960s (and a very un-sexy language, at that) among 3rd year students in Morocco is still blowing me away. "Yes, I'll be happy to talk about MARC -- let's plan to do it when we talk about cooperation and university libraries, since that's a context that's natural for me and we have some time in the syllabus."

As I say, I'm still recovering.