Database of databases

[Ghazali Mohamed Fadzil]

It would make everybody's life easier if you just use the HTML and make all
the text available through the internet.

(My humble opinion)

At 11:51 AM 10/22/96 -0700, Thomas H. Hahn wrote:
>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
>