Alan brings up some valid points regarding switching to a MARC compatible backend database. He is not the first to raise concerns with MARC. I believe that Rosa called it "icky"? :) We definitely need to get this worked out. Here's how I see the problem: Alan is looking to use Koha for a small home collection. Let's call this a 2,000 item library and call it the low end of the Koha user spectrum. Note that low end here is not intended to be an insult or a brush off, it's just an indication of the number of items in the collection. At the high end, we'd have collections with 1,000,000 items or more. I believe that most of those large libraries would insist on being able to directly view and edit bibliographic data using a MARC interface. In other words, if they were going to enter an author for a book, they'd want to see a 100 tag with an 'a' subfield to enter the name in, and a 'd' subfield to enter the date of birth/death in. In the small libraries, they'd just want the word author with a text field beside it.