I worked on this data in a former life and it is indeed a mess and derived from institutional records. But it’s not any more a mess than most other forms of lib

I worked on this data in a former life and it is indeed a mess and derived from institutional records. But it’s not any more a mess than most other forms of library-derived metadata because MARC and related formats are essentially pseudo-schemas that are at best haphazardly applied. From what I recall, there were attempts at regularization by the big universities involved with project, but they’re both not very good at tech projects and especially not good at finding and keeping the high-level talent that would be needed for something of this scale. But if you think bikeshedding is bad in tech, take a look into some disputes between library cataloguers over their arcana. Much of what they produce is valuable at level of a trained cataloguer who can navigate its inconsistencies and vagaries, but rarely so at the machine level.