>I think you're missing something vitally important here; the *rest* of
>the world eats XML for breakfast, it's what gets them up in the
>morning, and enables them to pull through. It's not about the
>greatness of XML itself (which I also can write a book or two about
>its virtues over *any* binary format; you just dare me!), but about
>what tools are available to deal with it.
>If our data was already in the realm of XML (as in real XML, not the
>faux MARCXML nonsense) there is ripe opportunity everywhere to try out
>our data. Chuck it in a native XML DB, for example, which I did with
>eXist and was fantastic (but of course the project failed the litmus
>test of having bad meta data that came out of MARC systems). I don't
>know how many tools out there support some kind of XML import or
>indexing, but suffice to say it outnumber the tools who can read MARC
>by the thousands. And I don't think I need to prove this, right? :)
And now, Alex, I must ask you how much experience you have (and not in a snarky, or evil way ;-)
The fact that data is in a valid XML format in no way guarantees its usefulness.
The problems of technology in libraries have almost nothing to do MARC as a format in and of itself. Bad metadata can and does come out of any system where bad data is entered.
And, by the way, MARC XML is just as useful as any XML schema you can dream up to contain bib information.
MARC has been around since the 1960's. XML since the 1990's. For all practical purposes, libraries around the country had the great bulk of their collections cataloged as MARC *before* XML became a viable alternative.
The problem with simply converting from MARC to some as-yet-undetermined XML Schema is the need to create a real, agreed-upon standard.
So, should all libraries simply convert to the Amazon standard? Perhaps, but, then the standard would have to be extended to contain all of the possible information that you can store in a MARC record - so, perhaps it's not that easy after all. Don't extend the Amazon format and discard the detailed information that MARC can contain? Why would we want to do that?
In any case, Amazon is not more popular than library catalogs because it uses some format other than MARC. It is clear that the problem for libraries lies in the fact that they share no openly accessible central database of bib records, a la Amazon. OCLC ain't giving away its records, as we all know...
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Kevin M. Kidd, MA, MLIS
Library Applications & Systems Manager
Boston College Libraries
Phone: 617-552-1359
Fax: 617-552-1089
e-Mail: kevin.kidd_at_bc.edu
Blog: http://datadrivenlibrary.blogspot.com/
Received on Wed Sep 24 2008 - 14:55:16 EDT