Another reason why the library community should rethink using MARC is that it, like an old house that has been remodeled year after year, is starting to lose its organizational consistency.
For instance, similar information is often stored in various places and formats within the MARC record. Even data, stored in similar parts of the MARC structure, is often stored in a variety of conflicting formats.
For example, the geographic code in the 043 field uses a different list of values than the place of publication code in bytes 15 through 17 of the 008 field. This type of disjunction would have an extremely adverse effect on retrieval if these codes were actually searchable.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the number of places that dates may occur in the MARC record, each place often having its own date format.
In field 005, for instance, the date is recorded in machine readable format. In 008, there is the pre-Y2K date that I mentioned earlier. Other date formats found in the MARC format include transcribed dates that are spelled out, archival inclusion dates, and dates with sequential designation, just to name a few.