Beth Morgan (Kentucky)

MARC is Not Dead

Cross stitch
Stitched by Beth Morgan / Designed by The Witchy Stitcher

“In 2002, Roy Tennant wrote the infamous article MARC Must Die, causing an uproar in the cataloging community. Twenty years on and MARC is still not dead. This piece is a play on the phrase Killin’ it, which MARC is still doing–for better or worse–fifty years after its implementation by the Library of Congress.”

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Beth Morgan is the special collections librarian and archivist at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Beth’s cross stitch shows the Grim Reaper in front of a silhouette of a church or town. The words above and below the Grim Reaper say “MARC – Killin’ it since 1970.” The MARC standard is used to create machine readable records to represent bibliographic information. The article by Roy Tennant is available from the Library Journal archive.