Jonathan Rochkind Wrote:
>>All I can say is that I and every other programmer in libraries that I
know that has tried to work with AACR2/MARC metadata has found that it
is not nearly as simple as you say to identify data elements of
interest. Despite our familiarity with the relevant standards, such as
they are.
...
>> All I can
say is the only people I know that think "it should be easy to get
whatever data you want out of library MARC" are people who aren't
programmers who have tried.
I'm not much of a programmer, but using the open-source Perl module,
developed by REAL programmers (really GOOD programmers, I would add.)
I've managed to pull out pretty much everything what I needed. On the
rare occasions when we needed and were able to hire a real programmer
the results were excellent.
If I were a real programmer and didn't want to dip into the Perl module
to grab what I wanted, I would probably want to use XML, there are
already programs to convert MARC to MARC-XML. MARC-XML is pretty
verbose and cludgey in terms of taking up space on your servers but if
you have plenty server space to stash it on it's no problem. Grabbing
things out of XML, even the cludgey MARC kind is quite easy, as long as
you know where you're grabbing from.
Ironically those who have cataloging/bibliographic knowledge lack
computing knowledge/server space. Those who have computing
knowledge/server space probably lack cataloging/bibliographic knowledge.
Catch-22!
However on the following point I expect you're totally correct!
>Google may have much more resources than any one of our libraries do,
but they still choose to expend them or not based on cost benefit. I
still suspect Google's estimate of the 'cost' is higher than you think
it is, AND that their estimate of the 'benefit' of using library data is
lower than you think it is.
JJ
**Views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent those of
the Queens Library.**
Jane Jacobs
Asst. Coord., Catalog Division
Queens Borough Public Library
89-11 Merrick Blvd.
Jamaica, NY 11432
tel.: (718) 990-0804
e-mail: Jane.W.Jacobs_at_queenslibrary.org
FAX. (718) 990-8566
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Received on Mon Sep 21 2009 - 11:47:54 EDT