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
"The MARC of Quality" (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 was also 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 our years of helping catalogers view their databases as more than a collection of unrelated records.

Copyrights, Trademarks, etc.

RIMMF, ©2012 Deborah Fritz, Richard Fritz.

Historical note: The MARC of Quality was the registered trademark under which we operated our business until 2013.

TMQ Inc. is a Florida corporation.