Still Waiting for That Funeral: the Challenges and Promises of a Next-Gen INTERMARC

The National library of France has used its own MARC-flavoured INTERMARC as a production format for almost forty years, and is now revisiting it to make it compatible with Semantic Web technologies and recently developed bibliographic models such as FRBR and IFLA LRM. We believe that keeping MARC as a production format allows for professional continuity and enhances the expertise of bibliographers, while exporting it as Linked Data acknowledges and meets the needs of a community of mainly non bibliographers users. Our objective is to switch from records to linked, reusable, and trustworthy data by increasing the portability of MARC records to a finer-grained level — all the while fitting into the ISO 2709 formalism. The context is that of a national process called Bibliographic transition that aims at native LRMised cataloguing through a French declination of RDA. And the stakes are increased higher by the necessity to implement change management for all those concerned.