HTML-MARC

[Rami Heinisuo]

Hello Marc 

(and those who are interested in MARC)

> 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

What about the character set? Or is it implied in one of your categories?
In Finland we use FINMARC, but I think there are variations in the
character sets between different user bodies.

Personally, I'd like to know if anyone has written a program that would
examine a file and after that it would tell me what character set /
standard is used in it ;)  

> >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.

But there are so many different MARCs...Understanding the semantics of
each and every one could be quite a task even if there weren't any errors
in the records...Good luck anyway.
 
> 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?

I agree with you that nothing is easier to parse than MARC. 

But, it would make sense if the metadata had to be in the same file as
the electronic document provided that the document would also be encoded
in SGML. And the size limit of a marc record is 100KB (admittedly it is
sufficient for most needs but there is no size limit in an SGML instance).

I have a SGML DTD for USMARC - I remember having downloaded it from
Berkeley...So anyone who is doing such a job could think twice whether
re-inventing the wheel is really necessary.


Greetings,

Rami

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Rami Heinisuo                             City Library of Pori
Information specialist           Regional library of Satakunta
rami.heinisuo at pori.fi                   PB 200  FIN-28101 PORI
						       FINLAND
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