On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 21:55, Jacobs, Jane W
<Jane.W.Jacobs_at_queenslibrary.org> wrote:
> One of the things I like about XML is that it's pretty easy to diddle it
> into something slightly different if that's what you need. So what's
> wrong with MARC to faux MARCXML to Cool XML that can do all these neat
> things? What's stopping us?
Poor meta data quality. I know of so many projects (and even more
smaller attempts) at converting and normalizing MARC data so it can be
reused. It's a pain to do, and it hasn't been solved.
Here's an example off the top of my head; using xml:id and xml:idrefs,
the simplest identity control we have, and it just doesn't exist in
MARC at all. MARC is the big sharing container we all use, and yet no
one came up with a mechanism for sharing?
> Here's a for instance that I bet lots of people
> recognize: I have a new Flash Drive sitting on my desk, [...]
> How many little things like that have
> we bought over the years that, well sorta work, somewhere?
I guess I could go into a spiel about open-source and open standards
right about now, but I'm not sure your example is a good one for large
software systems, unless your argument is "if they can't even do it
for small things like this, what hope have we got for big things?"
Anyway, your problem here lies with drivers and OSes, not with the
specification itself, unless this Flash-drive was designed especially
for librarians and can auto-index MARC records? :)
Regards,
Alex
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Received on Wed Sep 24 2008 - 14:43:24 EDT