Bibliographic freedom and the future direction of map cataloging

Abstract

With more and more cartographic data being created and released only as GIS datasets, map catalogers will eventually find themselves moving away from Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) as their primary bibliographic description schema and moving towards the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC). This move will be necessitated in large part by the needs of the cartographic user community, who are standardized on the FGDC format, and the realization that the FGDC provides a higher level of granularity than other metadata schemas when describing cartographic materials. At the same time, the library community’s need for quality MARC records for use within legacy ILS systems will not immediately disappear. This dual need will require map catalogers of the future to straddle two very different user communities and provide bibliographic description in multiple metadata schemas. This paper will discuss the use of metadata crosswalks as one method of bridging this gap between user communities.