[WEB4LIB] MySQL & MARC format

[Kyle Banerjee]

>>
I am just looking around at all the different types of databeses for a
catalog ... has anyone ever stored MARC records in a MySQL database? .. is
it even possible? how would you search for fields in the record itself?
>>

    A few come to mind -- OpenBook (http://openbook.learningaccess.org/) is
probably the most widely known, but, I've heard about a couple others such
as PHPMyLibrary (http://phpmylibrary.sourceforge.net) and Koha
(http://www.koha.org/). Not having used any of them, I can't speak to
quality, but the idea they're based on seems pretty good.

    As far as storing MARC records goes, I would be surprised if any system
actually stores the data in native MARC format. MARC is a communications
format that looks like binary junk to humans, and searching it directly
would be incredibly slow and resource intensive. What systems typically do
is store the information in a way that leads to easy search and retrieval.
In other words, indexes are built for fields that will be searched. If MARC
records are needed, they can just be generated.

kyle