Future
The future of the MARC formats is a matter of some debate among libraries. On the one hand, the storage formats are quite complex and are based on outdated technology. On the other, there is no alternative bibliographic format with an equivalent degree of granularity. The billions of MARC records in tens of thousands of individual libraries (including over 50,000,000 belonging to the OCLC consortium alone) create inertia.
Read more about this topic: MARC Standards
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The planet’s survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“The future is the worst thing about the present.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“One merit in Carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. He removes many cartloads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. His writings are all unfenced on the side of the future and the possible. Though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broadly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumerable pools and lakes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)