Archives for MARC

Mapping MARC

I’ve been following (off and on) the discussions on #code4lib about mapping MARC to indices. I know each ILS has a different way of making this happen, but I wonder whether there has been any effort to pool together the decisions people have made (for instance, what MARC fields and subfields should be used for [...]

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Libxml-Ruby vs. REXML in Ruby-MARC

This weekend I reimplemented the XMLReader and XMLWriter classes in ruby-marc using Libxml-Ruby, a Ruby layer over the Libxml2 C library. Currently, ruby-marc uses REXML, a pure Ruby XML library. Since REXML is built into Ruby, it is convenient. I was curious, though, how much of a performance boost there would be from using Libxml2. [...]

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The Jellybean Jar

Remember that contest where there is a jellybean jar full of jellybeans and the goal is to guess how many jellybeans there are in the jar? I think the MARC –> RDF question is a bit like that. RDF has been discussed lately on the MODS list (and a bit here). Ironically, there has been [...]

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MARC Down

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 [...]

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HCLC Authorities

So, I requested the HCLC authority records created by Sanford Berman and staff. I was excited today when the package arrived with my CD of the records (the letter says the CD includes both the authorities and bibs). The bad news is that the CD they returned is unreadable (or at least I am not [...]

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