Database of databases

[Thomas H. Hahn]

Dear colleagues,

perhaps this topic has been discussed before (I am a newcomer to the 
list, so please forgive me), but we (a small group of Sinologists) are planning 
to compile a catalog (or database, if you want) of digitised resources 
(mainly fulltext databases) concerning China, so we are looking for a suitable 
format and medium to do just that. 
The idea is not only to (gather and) supply information about the who, 
how (much) and other technical specifications of such databases, but also
 to incorporate this information into a medium that allows to connect to 
these sites right away. 

We realize that this could be done fairly easy simply by constructing a web 
site giving all these infos in html format. However, the point is that the OCLC 
project of cataloging  "the net" is not done that way (so we
heard), but, rather, the information is stored in, well, in what? Perhaps it is 
MARC (USMARC, UNIMARC) they use, a medium that may provide all 
the tags to actually describe the digital media itself. Our 
problem is that I do not want to re-invent the wheel and that we do want 
to be compatible to related projects (if there are any) in what we do.  
So if there is any project going on in this respect we could 
learn from we would be most grateful to hear about it. 

What we have is a flexible piece of library software (PC 
and UNIX-version), allowing information to be accessed in  
HTML form. We also have two SUN sparc servers. What we 
don't have is the format and the experience.
Any suggestions are welcome.

       Thomas H. Hahn
  University of Heidelberg
Institut for Chinese Studies