On 2/15/2011 10:34 AM, Weinheimer Jim wrote:
I am being real. The plain text format of MarcEdit *absolutely cannot* do the same as MARCXML. I'll prove this right now. Browsers are built to work with XML, so right now, this second, any webmaster can work on the fly with XML using nothing more than a browser. They need no other tools.
That's not really true. Most browsers don't give you any tools for 'working with' XML, although some (but not all) of them will display it with nice syntax-aware coloring.
You can edit both MARCXML and "MarcEdit text format" in any text editor though, no browser required. Although if you make a syntax mistake, you can easily make your record invalid. You can't really do that with Marc21 binary, it would be way too difficult (and require a calculator) to edit 'by hand'.
Nonetheless, I see no reason to think getting either "MarcEdit text format" OR MarcXML to be processed natively by our ILSs would be an improvement for us at all. If that's what's being suggested? I'm not sure what IS being suggested. If what you want to do is edit in MarcXML or "MarcEdit text format", it is trivial for software to convert back and forth from Marc21 binary to either of those formats -- which is why we have so much software that does it already. So what's the problem exactly? If the problem is that your ILS cataloging interface still is awful, then if you can't even get your vendor to improve it, what does that say about the prospects of getting your vendor to make your ILS import/export MarcXML or MarcEdit text format "natively" -- and what would it accomplish if you did?
Contrary to some popular belief, simply having your bad and poorly structured data in XML (as per MarcXML) doesn't magically make it easier for any software engineer or 'webmaster' to do useful things with it, it's still bad poorly structured data.
Jonathan
