About us

We, Richard and Deborah Fritz, both earned our MLS degrees from the University of Toronto and, between us, we have been librarians for over 80 years.

In the early 1990’s, we decided to branch out from actually working in libraries and work together on a very narrow and focused goal–to help catalogers in their mission to adequately and accurately describe the resources that they collect so that their users could find those resources.

To accomplish our goal, our objective (at that time) was to help catalogers create better MARC records by providing them with the best possible training, software, and database services that we could.

To do this, 1992 we started a company and called it “The MARC of Quality” (aka TMQ).

Over the years, TMQ kept its very narrow focus; to provide:

• in-depth training that covered both the cataloging rules (AACR and its later replacement, RDA) and the MARC encoding standard
• database services and consulting to support catalogers who wished to follow those standards
• quality control software specifically designed for the complexity of both the cataloging rules and the encoding standard

TMQ grew up in the Tampa Bay area, supporting the Tampa Bay Library Consortium with MARC Workshops and custom MARC software.

In time, our training expanded to cover the whole state of Florida; we developed a unique database processing software called OSMOSIS which made it (nearly) painless for non-cataloging OCLC members to maintain updated holdings on WorldCat; and we released our MARC Review and MARC Global software.

Our ALA Editions publications–Cataloging with AACR2R and USMARC (1998), its successor, Cataloging with AACR2 and MARC21 (2006), and MARC21 for Everyone (2003)–were direct by-products of our training and MARC database manipulation experiences.

After the release of the books, our training expanded and we took on one full-time employee (Lynn Fields) and 5 contract trainers to help us to provide workshops for libraries around the United States, the UK, New Zealand, Fiji, Lithuania, and Trinidad.

In 2003 we incorporated under the name “TMQ, Inc.”

Copyrights, Trademarks, 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.
MARC21 for Everyone, ©2003, Deborah Fritz, Richard Fritz.
Cataloging with AACR2 and MARC, 2nd edition, ©2006, Deborah Fritz.
RIMMF, ©2012-2022, Deborah Fritz, Richard Fritz.
MARC Report, ©2001-2021, TMQ, Inc.
MARC Report, ©2022- , Deborah Fritz, Richard Fritz.