About The MARC of Quality®

Our Mission
To help catalogers in their mission to organize all the information in the world.

How can we hope to achieve such a lofty goal?

By providing quality training, software, and database services to help you create better MARC records.

Company Profile
TMQ was started in 1992 by Deborah and Richard Fritz, a pair of librarians who love cataloging and computers, respectively (i.e. one of us loves cataloging and the other loves computers;  both love libraries).

TMQ has a very narrow focus: to provide in-depth training that emphasises both MARC standards and  AACR rules; to provide MARC software that supports this training and consulting emphasis, and puts the batch processing power of the traditional vendor into the hands of the library; and to provide database services and consulting to support libraries that wish to follow these standards.

TMQ grew up in the TampaBay area, supporting the Tampa Bay Library Consortium with MARC Workshops and custom MARC software.  From there, our training expanded to cover the whole state of Florida; we developed a unique database processing software called OSMOSIS which makes it (nearly) painless for non-cataloging OCLC members to maintain updated holdings on WorldCat; and we released our MARC Review and MARC Global software, now used by libraries large and small throughout English-speaking the world.

The ALA Editions best-seller,  Cataloging with AACR2R and USMARC (known in-house as CWAM, which we pronounce ‘See-Wham’),  was a direct by-product of Deborah’s training for the Florida consortiums.  Our MARC record software tool, MARC Report, is another result of Deborah’s training experiences and her goal of helping catalogers create the best possible records with the least amount of stress.

Since the release of ‘the book’, our training availability has expanded to libraries throughout the United States.  Please have a look at the Training Page for more information, schedules, and locations.

To begin our tenth year of business, we co-authored MARC21 for Everyone, which has just been published by ALA Editions. This book grew out of Deborah’s most popular and most revised workshop:  ‘An Intro to MARC’, but also contains a lot of insight from ten years of helping catalogers view their databases as more than a collection of unrelated records. 

Opportunities

We are a small company and do not have job openings per se.  We work on a contract basis with other dedicated professionals in the field. 

 

To keep pace with the demand for our MARC training, we are always looking for an individual, with excellent cataloging knowledge and presentation skills, to present introductory workshops around the country.  We would also like to partner with someone in the area of online course design. 

 

To work with us, you must really know your stuff (MARC and AACR), love what you do, and want to be the best at what you do.

 

Please inquire about these opportunities by email.

 

Trademarks, Copyrights, etc.

MARC Review, ©1993, ©1994, ©1995, The MARC of Quality.

MARC Global, ©1997, The MARC of Quality.

Cataloging with AACR2 and MARC, ©1998, Deborah Fritz.

MARC Report, ©2001, The MARC of Quality.

MARC21 for Everyone, ©2003, Deborah Fritz.

The MARC of Quality® is a registered trademark (2,590,745) of TMQ Inc., a Florida corporation.