A Study on MARC21 Transformation and Application for Linked Data

MARC has been accepted as a standard format for information interchange in libraries for decades. Owing to the outdated format, MARC is unknown and unused outside of libraries. Moving to the era of semantic web, the technology of linked data (LD) is regarded as a new approach to deconstruct library bibliographic data (LBD) into LD for libraries. It is deserved to examine what approach has been adopted to extend MARC into LD and its potential benefits. This study has analyzed MARC proposals and discussion papers related to LD as a basis to investigate what changes have been approved for MARC since 2006 of the LD initiative. Furthermore, eight use cases selected from two MARC records and an instance of one MARC proposal respectively were employed to address how MARC changes have been transformed MARC-based LBD into LD in practice by combining classes and properties of BIBFRAME and RDA bibliographic ontology. Consequently, it reveals that RDF’s triplification has been integrated as part of MARC successfully. Therefore, MARC is not only a standard for communication and representation of bibliographic and related information, but also one for LD in libraries. Related issues to fundamental definition of bibliographic entity defined in MARC proposals for LD have also discussed.