HTML-MARC

[Marc Salomon]

In a related note...

In examining the deployment of metadata formats on the WWW, the presence of a
large body of MARC-binary format metadata records can't be ignored.

I've been thinking about writing up a document on specifying an internet media
type that describes enough of the properties of a MARC record so that content
negotiation can be performed and if successful, MARC data served.

A question to the librarian types out there (computer geeks, feel free to
respond too)...Do you all think that the following would be sufficiently
descriptive of the properties of an arbitrary MARC record to decide if your
applications could understand both the encoding format as well as the semantics
of each tag:

type     - USMARC, UKMARC ...                   - major type of marc rec
rec      - bib, opac, med, innspec, hold ...    - type of data encoded
auth     - oclc, nlm, ucdla ...                 - encoding authority

>From my experience with a small subset of MARC encodings, this seems to be
enough information, but I'd appreciate it if you all would point out any
show-stoppers that I've forgot.

Also, a few years ago, we were talking about an SGML DTD for MARC.  But we
decided that MARC is a container for structured metadata as is SGML, so why
another container?  What exactly is the point of encoding MARC into SGML?  That
SGML (Hah!) is easier to parse than MARC?

thanks,

-marc


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