[Web4lib] MARC to XML: the agony and the ecstasy

[Christopher Harris]

I think the key here is to talk about XML as being real English. The title
is labeled as the title and only has the title (not a string of title and
statement of responsibility). The number of pages is the number of pages and
doesn't talk about col. ill. This lets us speak in English in our catalogs -
in our Fish4Info portal we have stripped MARC out into XML to allow us to
display authors with first name first, show the number of pages, and just be
a lot more friendly - http://fish4info.org/avo-h/node/8406. This also lets
us pull bits of data out and use them again to show page numbers and what
not on book reviews - http://fish4info.org/avo-h/node/8572.

I think one of the challenges you are going to face is that XML isn't the
answer to your question. The answer is SQL or some other decent and open
database. XML is the transmission and display technology, but the real power
is that it is so much easier to rip into a database to be called by dymanic
websites. One of the biggest problems with MARC isn't MARC itself (though it
has real issues) but with the closed nature of databases in library systems
after the MARC records are finally parsed out.

chris

On 10/10/07, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
>
> For a presentation, I'm trying to come up with examples of what happens
> when MARC is transformed to XML and then exposed through search engines
> such as Endeca, Siderean, etc. ... examples that work well for
> librarians who are at least a little familiar with MARC. Part of the
> message I'm getting across is that MARC is very record-oriented and XML
> is about data (MARC is from Mars... XML is from Venus?); but I'm also
> trying to suggest that when we start exposing MARC in new webby
> environments sometimes we get some new abilities, but other times the
> results are not so pretty, due to limitations of the source data, even
> though it's now XML.
>
> Originally I was trying to come up with metaphors about the difference
> between MARC and the recombinative, hey-let's-put-on-a-show quality of
> XML (a banana, an orange, and an apple... or fruit salad; a formal
> garden... a rose float at the parade) but then I remembered what it was
> like to explain email in the early days of the 'net, and the reality is
> that the way to do that was to sit people in front of a computer and
> have them send and receive messages. (Remember all those metaphors we
> strained for in the Early Days?) So I'm hoping to find some good, live
> examples of what I'm talking about.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kschneider at cclaflorida.org
> Research & Development
> College Center for Library Automation
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-- 
Chris Harris - infomancy at gmail.com - http://schoolof.info/infomancy