> My objection is that it would be better to work out what is
> actually wanted, rather than how it is stored, and create a
> context set that would be useful outside of searching
> databases of marc records.
>
> Then the answer to the original question is Yes, not only do
> we make it easier, we make it that your users don't need to
> lug around a copy of the marc bibliographic tables just to
> work out what to put in the search field.
It depends *who* the users are - one community of users we have around
Oxford are cataloguers (about 500 of them). Our cataloguing client
currently uses Z39.50 and the Z39.50 extended update service, but
there's no reason why it shouldn't use SRW and SRW-Update in a future
incarnation.
For such people who eat sleep and dream MARC tags, formatting a query in
MARC comes much more naturally that formulating dublin core queries.
Especially if what they really want to search for are examples are where
someone else has catalogued a record which uses a 852$x linking field to
a 946 field. Or what the 652$v looks like if the 652 indicator1 is set
to 6, or some other esoteric cataloguing issue etc. etc.
Matthew
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