ScorpMARC - An Updated Standard For Catalogue Data

Its important to be able to represent the truth about an item in an abstract record. Librarians, cataloguers, and related information management professionals like daemonic summoners have known this since time immemorial and have always espoused the advantages of being able to correctly identify all the attributes relating to an entity, whether it be a book, a serial publication, or the seventh incarnation of the veiled shadow who stalks us all.

Traditional protocols used for information management such as Z39.50, LDAP, psychic transference, and good old fashion grimoire borrowing have helped a lot with this, but none of these standards have a uniform way of representing data about an item, making sharing in cross-discipline difficult. The ScorpInc family of conglomerates, shell companies, and multidimensional hiveminds has worked tirelessly on making sure information within the company is widely available (subject to classification and OH&S restrictions). For this reason our internal information management researchers and cryptolibrarians have been working on a new format for storing catalogued information about entities. Our work has been incredibly successful internally and we are now proud to release the ScorpMARC standard for cataloguing data.

Based of our existing use of standards including MARC21, UNIMARC, and Grimoirbituary for recording data about items and individuals, weve developed ScorpMARC as a way of cataloguing data and ensuring that all relevant information can be scribed along with metadata including level of access to the entity being recorded, known issues or uncertainties, danger and classification levels, as well as interlinking and embedding related sub- or super-entities. The format extends beyond what traditional formats allow, allowing users to record:

• Safe names of entities to prevent incidental summonings and allow coded reference to works without being accused of being a David Foster Wallace tosser.
• True names of power to allow records to safely bind daemons, authors who need to stop posting on social media, and litigious publishers.
• Support for multiple character encodings within the same record, including UTF-8, DigiEnochian, and eWillhelm-2027 (the upcoming standard for encoding ritual screams as printable character forms).

The ScorpMARC standard is the new way to record information, but it doesnt help if the only software to access it is maintained by one person as a hobby project, so were also releasing a suite of tools to allow you to create new records, copy catalogue existing records, and convert from other known formats. Well update this post once the tools are made available including:

• A web application for quick ScorpMARC work on the fly.
• Native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, Plan 9, GNU Hurd, zOS, and IRIX.
• A correctly blood-protected grimoire available for purchase from all major haemo-retailers as well as printable versions available in .docx, .pdf, and .tex formats.

When it comes to information management, ScorpInc is the name you will trust.