Our Standards vs Their Standards: Development and Re-Use of Non-Library Standards in the Cultural Heritage Domain

When exchanging data between systems, it is important to use well-defined standards that are widely acknowledged and have a large user base in order to make the data interoperable. This paper looks at how three kinds of data are transported in MARC 21 and UNIMARC: floating point numbers, (birth) dates and geographic coordinates. The encoding of this data is compared to existing industry standards and finally discussed in the context of how this information should be recorded using the upcoming library standard RDA and the role of library systems as mediators between cataloguing code, local conventions and exchange formats.