At Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:43:47 -0800
Dick Miller wrote:
>
> Regardless of where/how records are stored, MARC needs a thorough overhaul.
> Libraries are using a 'communications' format that is not flexible enough
> for the needs of web-oriented access.
Very true. MARC was indeed conceived as just that, a communications format,
(and for magnetic tape!) not a database storage format. Using it as such is
therefore necessarily suboptimal - yet lots of systems do it. For present-
day communications needs MARC is certainly outdated.
XML, too, was not designed as a database storage format, if I'm not
terribly wrong. One should therefore be cautious not to make the same
mistake again.
What we need is storage formats and database software that can easily export
MARC as well as XML and other structures. Internally, the richness of content
that MARC can convey has to be preserved and efficiently stored. When
looking at XML-coded data, I cannot help feeling uneasy for one often
finds the amount of tagging to outweigh the amount of data, and I'm reluctant
to call that efficient. At least when it comes to storing millions
or records. But of course, something that demonstrably works better than what
we have (but not just in the communications aspect), will eventually win, and
we're not going to defend MARC for MARC's sake.
Regards, B.E.
Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel. +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX -5836
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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