Good day, all. I'm a newb related to "proper" cataloging of media, but a impassioned Perl programmer. I've been reading rather heavily into MARC and related cataloging/indexing stuff, and I've a few questions, most innocently starting off with:
* I am not a trained librarian. Is there a friendly place for self-taught, enthused users to ask questions concerning the various technologies? I understand that this list is _perl_ for _librarians_, and innocent questions about MARC and "how best to catalog $this" probably aren't on-topic here. Certainly encourage me if I'm wrong.
* In looking around for pre-packaged Perl products, I've found numerous, but they all seem to suffer from a few problems which are no fault of their own:
* they're ugly and time-consuming to use.
* they cater to library-installations only (as they should,
but Koha, for instance, forces me through about five to
twelve screens before I can add one item. I don't care
about ordering, acquisitions, or budgeting - I just
want a "proper" [1] database). * they haven't been developed in ages, and support seems
scattered around numerous sites, people, and organizations
(jake, most notably).Am I missing the magical product? The closest I've seen is phpMyLibrary, but that still doesn't satisfy all my "needs" [2].
* Since I'm newb, I'm still learning about MARC and all the tags
and they're meanings. For one, there seems to be numerous
output formats of MARC (MARC communication, tabbed/column
view, XML view, etc., etc.). What format does MARC.pm
write? I noticed on a TODO list somewhere a request for
output formating? Is anyone interested in a MARC::Simple
sort of module, that would "use English"-ize all the tags
themselves ($record->author_name("Logan, Robert K.") and
$record->author_date("1939-"), which would just be wrappers
around MARC::Field and the relevant tag numbers).* Does MARC::Record create leaders? Is there anything that does? Leaders are something which I'm still confused about.
Thanks for listening.
[1] Defined as "uses the same indexing rules as librarians use",
"uses open source software", and "can export into formats
readily usable by other oss4lib projects". "Quick", manual
entry of five thousand 99%-chance-they're-not-MARCed items
would be nice too ;)[2] Which, at this point, aren't really relevant, as I'm thirsting
for knowledge about everything from everyone, so that I can
further nail down exactly where my needs and wants begin.-- Morbus Iff ( i put the demon back in codemonkey ) Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ Mac OS X Hacks: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596004605/disobeycom icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
