Weinheimer Jim schrieb:
>
> There are several other differences, including some of differing cataloging philosophies.
>
There are indeed substantial other differences: there are no indicators
for names and titles, and none for almost everything else,
series titles are mostly abbreviated (like "Internat. Ser. Lin. Math.")
and always use 490 only. And no 008, nor a leader or other fixed fields.
I'm afraid this is a very diluted version of MARC. Will others
dumb down their data in exactly the same way or in any number
of different ways? Whom and how much might that help?
And then, for data as meager as this, MARCXML is an extremely voluminous
wrapper, there's at least five times more wrapping than there is data.
Though space is no issue any more, bandwidth is, and it can't
pass for an elegant means of exchange this way. That's not CERN's fault,
of course. But what's needed is a much more compact and more easily
understandable (human readable) communication format. Lacking this,
Z39.50 nd OAI-DC are currently doing a much better job.
B.Eversberg
Received on Mon Feb 01 2010 - 09:04:53 EST