export to text or Oracle?

[KAREN SCHNEIDER]

I am mulling over a scheme for cataloging Internet resources and
exporting them to our local web database, soon to be
Oracle-based.  (GILS is the Government Information Locator
Service--see http://www.usgs.gov/gils/ for more info.)   In fact, I
am mulling over a second scheme for exporting them from GILS
into OCLC (since many of htese records will be created with a
metadata entry form on the web by the document originators and
will then pass to the Library for QA).   Well, as long as we're
indexing and ctaloging,  and fiddling and twiddling, and having
meetings and rewriting stuff, why not, ay?  I'm not clear it
wouldn't SAVE time to create the records  in OCLC and export,
anyway, assuming we got a good workform going.  

 We're using locally-developed subject terms (which the GILS
profile supports) ,  developed by the Region 1 Library,  but our
records, in accordance with the GILS profile, map to USMARC
(though normal human beings wouldn't realize this).  

As I mull this over, I see at least several issues:

* Ensuring that records enttered locally can export cleanly to
proper OCLC format -- by this I mean, for example,  if we are
entering dates, making sure they are entered IAW USMARC
format, so we don't have to clean them up.  This also, quite
frankly, has to do with our cataloging expertise, which is minimal;
frnakly, I've shyed from Intercat because I didn't want to
contribute incredibly bad records.  I'm almost to the point where I
can clone a new record from an older record.  

* Figuring out how to export from text or Oracle to MARC 

*  Figuring out how to export from OCLC to text or Oracle

What I'm trying to do is comply with the spirit of Intercat *and*
GILS *and* local indexing efforts.  Our libary catalog, quite
frankly, isn't going to be the place people look for Internet
resources, nor is it a good place to do this anyway, being a
primitive mainframe proprietary catalog.  (In other words, when
you get there you can't do anyting about the URL, unless your
client makes URLs hot, which isn't something we should impose
on the user.)  And this isn't something we control or can change
locally, either.  But I still see it as potentially valuable (even from
a strictly exploratory perspective) to enter these records into
OCLC, if possible, and is an interesting example of controlling
records with multiple destinies. 

Any suggestions?  I wish I could show you the metadata entry
form--I'll take some screen caps and put it on our web page.  (It's
not accessible to the public.)  It's pretty neat, and was developed
in a coordinated computer-weenie-library-weenie effort. 

Karen G. Schneider
Contractor, GCI
Director, US EPA Region 2 Library
opinions mine alone