[Refdb-users] Re: Is refdb international?

[Markus H. <hoe...@co...>]

Janusz S. Bie=F1 writes:
 > I made a search of Sourceforge for MARC related project and found
 > quite a lot of them: marc.pm, XMLMARC, MARC Template Library, Marcus=

 > and other.  Unfortunately, the most interesting ones, such as
 > phpMyLibrary, hasn't released any files yet.
 >=20

...and others are dormant since releasing their first
version. Sometimes Sourceforge looks to me like a graveyard of brillian=
t
ideas. I'll take a close look and see whether any of these projects
are useful for our purposes.

 > The full text of Z39.50 is available somewhere of the net. If you ar=
e
 > interested, I can try to dig out the exact reference from my archive=
s.
 > It is definitely interesting what is the format of a record download=
ed
 > with Z39.50. Maybe my guess that it is MARC was wrong?
 >=20

I'll look for the specs, but I'd appreciate if you have a pointer
handy.

 > I am not sure that a really good documentation really exists, probab=
ly
 > all texts are addresses to professional libralians. On the other han=
d,
 > this is more a potential problem for interested user than for the
 > implementor.
 >=20

The web site came back up after I sent my mail yesterday. The
documentation at least explains the funny element names, and this is
what worried me most at first sight. They use the three-digit codes as
element names. This makes the XML almost impossible to read as a
human, but a parser won't care. It's just going to be a pain to write
the handlers for the parser.

 > As for the MARC variant, there seems to be a lot of work done on
 > unifying them, cf. http://www.dbc.dk/ONE/oneweb/soft.html. =20
 >=20
 > From practical point of view UNIMARC (I have a following reference t=
o
 > it, which may be obsolete: http://ifla.org/VI/3/p1996-1/unimarc.htm)=

 > sounds better :-), but almost all university libraries in Poland use=

 > USMARC. =20
 >=20

I think it is important to start somewhere, so USMARC might be the
better choice if it is more widely used.

 > I am too busy to do it just now, but either I will do it myself late=
r
 > or will find a student to do it for us. Are we alone on the list? :-=
)
 > Perhaps somebody else can do the experiments sooner.

We're certainly not alone but this is the first time that somebody
brought up the issue of character sets. I'd really like to see how
important this is for "real users".

regards,
Markus

--=20
Markus Hoenicka <hoe...@co...>
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/