On Apr 20, 2010, at 8:19 AM, Ross Singer wrote:
> Honestly this debate between MARC or MODS is a red herring. The MARC
> structure is not insurmountable and it's easy enough to abstract it
> away if need be. The problem is (as Alexander has pointed out) the
> data it's actually transporting. ISO2709 isn't nearly the problem
> that ISBD/AACR2 punctuation brings for a developer (or, anybody but a
> librarian, really) trying to make semantic sense of anything but the
> most controlled set of records.
IMHO, this is EXACTLY correct. Its is the ISBD/AACR2 sort of stuff that is so field specific and inconsistently applied that it is almost impossible to parse MARC, MARCXML, or MODS without going through a million conditional statements.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 08:27:42 EDT