Re: Whose elephant is it, anyway? (the OLE project)

If you are looking for a standard that is designed to represent complex 
possibilities, AND is machine actionable without being difficult, and is 
quite elegant to boot, I'd reccommend you look at ONIX Serials Coverage 
Statement.

http://www.editeur.org/onixserials.html

They did quite a good job with it. While it's motivating use case is 
_electronic_ holdings, it's a compact, flexible, and elegant format for 
expressing ranges of holdings in a way that easily applies to print as 
well.

Jonathan

Stephens, Owen wrote:
> If this does allow machine parsing (and I'm a bit sceptical - even if it is it certainly it looks like a lot of hard work), it hasn't been designed that way.
>
> To take a simple example
> 									
> 853	20$81$av.$bno.$u6$vr$i(year)$j(month)$wm$x01,07
> 863	30$81.1$a113-123$i1923-1928
>
> The start and end volumes are in a single field, as are the start and end years - immediately making it harder work for the programmer. And all of this is where they have bothered to use the 853/863 anyway.
>
> I realise that the MARC holdings formats are designed to show quite complex possibilities, but what would be immediately useful (IMO) is broad statements like those offered in link resolver software that can give top level answers...
>
> Owen Stephens
> Assistant Director: eStrategy and Information Resources
> Central Library
> Imperial College London
> South Kensington Campus
> London
> SW7 2AZ
>  
> t: +44 (0)20 7594 8829
> e: o.stephens_at_imperial.ac.uk
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
>> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
>> Sent: 19 March 2009 14:39
>> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Whose elephant is it, anyway? (the OLE project)
>>
>> Stephens, Owen wrote:
>>
>>     
>>>> I was thinking CONSER might have the equivalent. At least, MARC
>>>> holdings
>>>> format does make provisions for that.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> Does it? I've never seen MARC summary holdings recorded in a way that
>>>       
>> is easily machine parsable
>>     
>> That may be, but at least the specs *are* all there:
>>
>> http://www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/
>>
>> and more particularly in
>>
>> http://www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/hd863865.html
>>
>> What we have looks somewhat simpler.
>>
>> B.Eversberg
>>     
>
>