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Dear Marietta Boyer [and others],
You asked about using Argus for cataloging books. When I was at
the Amon Carter Museum, we considered (1993-1995) whether books
should be added to the museum collection system. We were
considering Argus and other systems.
The folks from Questor reported that the Strong Museum in
Rochester was very happy with the truncated OCLC records they
had in their Argus database.
We used RLIN at the Amon Carter and did not seriously consider
moving our active book cataloging from RLIN to Argus, which is
not to say that you couldn't do that. Those book records would
never be transferrable to a full MARC books database should that
be in your future. We did however consider whether we wanted to
load the RLIN records (in whole or in part) into Argus to
facilitate access to library materials. By the time I left the
museum in mid-1995, any decision to load library records into
Argus had been postponed but I think we began to realize that
you wouldn't necessarily want to have one response to a query
that mixed the museum records with the books with the archives
with the slides, etc. You want the shifting from file to file,
or database to database, to be clear and easy, but you don't
want a single response especially if it's a large response.
The whole area of field mapping is however very fluid and there
is recognition in the MARC community that not all current
databases are not being built in MARC (not that they ever were).
You may have heard of the Dublin core record which describes the
basic information you might use to describe a resource (aka
metadata). The goal of establishing such a core record is that
database developers and maintainers will be more likely to have
author information separate from title information, etc. And to
be able to treat author information rather consistently, etc.
I hope some of these thoughts are clear enough to be of
assistance.
Sherman Clarke
NYU Libraries
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