Hi Brian: thanks for writing, On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 04:29:37PM -0300, Brian Cassidy wrote: > As part of a previous project I was importing MARC records into an RDBMS > structure. In order to facilitate better searching, it was suggested to > me that I do some normalization on my data and that NACO normalization > would be a good choice for guidelines. So, away I went and came back > with normalize() sub which does the trick. > > I now wonder if this code would have greater utility as a module on > CPAN. And if I do decide to upload it to CPAN, perhaps a base class > (Text::Normalize) should be created to which NACO normalization could be > added as a subclass.
I think this is a great idea. At first I was thinking that it would be nice to be able to pass your normalize() function a MARC::Record object, which would magically normalize all the relevant fields (like a good cataloger). This could be a subclass MARC::Record::NACO which adds a new method normalize(), or if Andy was willing could be added to the MARC::Record core. However, the docs [1] seem to say that it is only possible to determine how a field should normalize in the context of the collection of records that it is a part of...and that MARC::Record has no way of determining this, so perhaps this idea is not on target? If you would like to contribute your NACO normalization function to cpan (as I definitely think you should), and my reading of the lc docs are correct, then I would recommend you add a Text::NACO module. The Normalize part is a bit redundant because all the modules in Text do some kind of normalization. The package could export a function normalize() on demand, which you then pass a string, and get back the NACO normalized version. You could also add it to the Biblio namespace as Biblio::NACO, or MARC::NACO, but that's really your call as the module author :) The main thing is to get it up there somewhere. Please post to the list if you decide to upload. I'd like to add a section to the tutorial, and to the perl4lib.perl.org website! //Ed [1] http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco/normrule.html
