The blog post includes a few words of introduction from OCLC's Karen Smith-Yoshimura. She is also a co-author of the report. She writes:
We believe that MARC data cannot continue to exist in its own discrete environment. It will need to be leveraged and used in other domains to reach users in their own networked environments. With the increase of digitized full text from various mass digitization efforts, we advise MARC practitioners to focus on authorized names, classifications, identifiers, and controlled vocabularies that key-word searching of full-text will not provide, rather than on “descriptive metadata”.
The blog post continues with one or two paragraph summaries:
I [Karen Karen Smith-Yoshimura (OCLC)] analyzed MARC tag usage in WorldCat, with a focus on how tag usages differed in non-book formats compared to the rest of WorldCat. This was based on a September 2009 snapshot, when WorldCat contained 145 bibliographic records.
Hugh Taylor (University of Cambridge) analyzed the MARC tags used for matching records while building five aggregated databases — the Research Libraries UK’s union catalog for record retrieval, COPAC (the public union catalog derived from the RLUK database), WorldCat, the former RLG Union Catalog, and Libraries Australia — and compared the tags used with those mandated by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and OCLC Level 3 records.
Catherine Argus National Library of Australia) analyzed the MARC tags that are indexed in five aggregate databases — AMICUS (the national union catalog of Canada), COPAC, Libraries Australia, WorldCat.org and OCLC’s FirstSearch.
Chew Chiat Naun (University of Minnesota) analyzed the MARC fields represented in WorldCat records bearing different encoding levels. He concluded that encoding level has limited value for selecting the “most complete” record and that encoding levels assigned at a batchload or project level can be misleading of a record’s content.
Timothy J. Dickey (OCLC Research) collaborated with Peter Hirsch (The New York Public Library) to compare the use of form/genre designations and relator terms in the NYPL’s local catalog and in WorldCat.
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