Lorcan Dempsey has posted about the recent XML4LIB discussions. He highlights one posting that escaped my notice (because, to be honest, I was originally trying to avoid jumping into the discussion). He says (of someone else who posted on the topic): “He reminds people of the three layers in the classical library metadata stack: encoding (ISO 2709 or Z39.2), content designation (as expressed in the various MARC formats), and content values (which is the focus of cataloging rules and controlled terminologies).”

My own post (far from thoughtful, unfortunately… hmmm, am I blog people?) commented that MARC and XML are the first layer (both are the structure in which information is passed around). Then I sort of merged the next two layers, commenting that a 245 has no real importance apart from that assigned to it by cataloging rules (e.g., the idea of title and the rules that govern recording a title both seem, to me, to be under the control of cataloging rules (both are AACR2 governed)).

Lorcan Dempsey also commented that Dublin Core focused on the middle layer (and this caused several possible third layer possibilities to pop up). The first layer, of course, is handled by XML. The whole thing made me think a bit about XOBIS.

We have assumed the encoding layer would be XML. We focused on the second layer and explicitly said, when appropriate, that a particular issue would be handled by the third layer. The interesting difference between DC and XOBIS is that DC started as a community effort… committees were set up, vested interests consulted, etc. XOBIS is just an experiment that attempts to ask and answer (or, rather, give one possible answer to) some interesting questions, but we haven’t really tried to drum up a community around it.

We have been told that we should do this, but apart from giving presentations on it we haven’t. I think, in part, this is because we are more interested in the questions than in doing the work needed to make a standard (perhaps I should just speak for myself on that though).

We have always taken the approach that we are experimenting (this gives us a bit more leeway in our approach and delivery). This is not to say that we shouldn’t tackle the nuts and bolts, but that we’ve worked from the perspective that we didn’t have limitations (so that we would not be restricted by them). In the end, though, one still has to deal with them in order to produce something useful.

Interestingly, Dick has just finished a study of the tags used by Lane Library. Now that I am no longer there, though, I find myself wondering (once again) about an XSLT stylesheet that goes from MARC to XOBIS (my earlier attempts at tranforming MARC into XOBIS were done in Java).

Lane and Dick do a lot of special things with their records (making the transformation easier). I’m now wondering about what will be involved with creating a transformation for a standard MARC record (without all of Lane’s special enhancements). Once I get a little more free time (after April 15th), I’d like to take a shot at it.